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Abstract. An improved understanding of present-day climate variability and change relies on high-quality data sets from the past 2 millennia. Global efforts to model regional climate modes are in the process of being validated against, and integrated with, records of past vegetation change. For South America, however, the full potential of vegetation records for evaluating and improving climate models has hitherto not been sufficiently acknowledged due to an absence of information on the spatial and temporal coverage of study sites. This paper therefore serves as a guide to high-quality pollen records that capture environmental variability during the last 2 millennia. We identify 60 vegetation (pollen) records from across South America which satisfy geochronological requirements set out for climate modelling, and we discuss their sensitivity to the spatial signature of climate modes throughout the continent. Diverse patterns of vegetation response to climate change are observed, with more similar patterns of change in the lowlands and varying intensity and direction of responses in the highlands. Pollen records display local-scale responses to climate modes; thus, it is necessary to understand how vegetation–climate interactions might diverge under variable settings. We provide a qualitative translation from pollen metrics to climate variables. Additionally, pollen is an excellent indicator of human impact through time. We discuss evidence for human land use in pollen records and provide an overview considered useful for archaeological hypothesis testing and important in distinguishing natural from anthropogenically driven vegetation change. We stress the need for the palynological community to be more familiar with climate variability patterns to correctly attribute the potential causes of observed vegetation dynamics. This manuscript forms part of the wider LOng-Term multi-proxy climate REconstructions and Dynamics in South America – 2k initiative that provides the ideal framework for the integration of the various palaeoclimatic subdisciplines and palaeo-science, thereby jump-starting and fostering multidisciplinary research into environmental change on centennial and millennial timescales.

Asseng, S. et al. Crop models are essential tools for assessing the threat of climate change to local and global food production1. Present models used to predict wheat grain yield are highly uncertain when simulating how crops respond to temperature2. Here we systematically tested 30 different wheat crop models of the Agricultural Model Intercomparison and Improvement Project against field experiments in which growing season mean temperatures ranged from 15 °C to 32 °C, including experiments with artificial heating. Many models simulated yields well, but were less accurate at higher temperatures. The model ensemble median was consistently more accurate in simulating the crop temperature response than any single model, regardless of the input information used. Extrapolating the model ensemble temperature response indicates that warming is already slowing yield gains at a majority of wheat-growing locations. Global wheat production is estimated to fall by 6% for each °C of further temperature increase and become more variable over space and time. We thank the Agricultural Model Intercomparison and Improvement Project and its leaders C. Rosenzweig from NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Columbia University (USA), J. Jones from University of Florida (USA), J. Hatfield from United States Department of Agriculture (USA) and J. Antle from Oregon State University (USA) for support. We also thank M. Lopez from CIMMYT (Turkey), M. Usman Bashir from University of Agriculture, Faisalabad (Pakistan), S. Soufizadeh from Shahid Beheshti University (Iran), and J. Lorgeou and J-C. Deswarte from ARVALIS—Institut du Végétal (France) for assistance with selecting key locations and quantifying regional crop cultivars, anthesis and maturity dates and R. Raymundo for assistance with GIS. S.A. and D.C. received financial support from the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). C.S. was funded through USDA National Institute for Food and Agriculture award 32011-68002-30191. C.M. received financial support from the KULUNDA project (01LL0905L) and the FACCE MACSUR project (031A103B) funded through the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). F.E. received support from the FACCE MACSUR project (031A103B) funded through the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (2812ERA115) and E.E.R. was funded through the German Science Foundation (project EW 119/5-1). M.J. and J.E.O. were funded through the FACCE MACSUR project by the Danish Strategic Research Council. K.C.K. and C.N. were funded by the FACCE MACSUR project through the German Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture (BMEL). F.T., T.P. and R.P.R. received financial support from FACCE MACSUR project funded through the Finnish Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry (MMM); F.T. was also funded through National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 41071030). C.B. was funded through the Helmholtz project ‘REKLIM—Regional Climate Change: Causes and Effects’ Topic 9: ‘Climate Change and Air Quality’. M.P.R. and P.D.A. received funding from the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture, and Food Security (CCAFS). G.O’L. was funded through the Australian Grains Research and Development Corporation and the Department of Environment and Primary Industries Victoria, Australia. R.C.I. was funded by Texas AgriLife Research, Texas A&M University. E.W. and Z.Z. were funded by CSIRO and the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) through the research project ‘Advancing crop yield while reducing the use of water and nitrogen’ and by the CSIRO-MoE PhD Research Program. Peer reviewed

This study investigates the physical basis of temperature‐index models for three glaciers in contrasting climates: Zongo (16°S, 5050 m, Bolivian Tropics), St Sorlin (45°N, 2760 m, French Alps), and Storglaciären (67°N, 1370 m, northern Sweden). The daily energy fluxes were computed during melt seasons and correlated with each other and with air temperature on and outside the glacier. The relative contribution of each flux to the correlations between temperature and melt energy was assessed. At Zongo, net short‐wave radiation controls the variability of the energy balance and is poorly correlated to temperature. On tropical glaciers, temperature remains low and varies little, melt energy is poorly correlated to temperature, and degree‐day models are not appropriate to simulate daily melting. At the yearly scale, the temperature is better correlated to the mass balance because it integrates the ablation and the accumulation processes over a long time period. At Sorlin, the turbulent sensible heat flux is greater because of higher temperatures, but melt variability is still controlled by short‐wave radiation. Temperature correlates well with melt energy mainly through short‐wave radiation, probably because of diurnal advection of warm air from the valley. At Storglaciären, high correlations between temperature and melt energy result from substantial variability of the sensible and latent heat fluxes (which both supply energy to the glacier), and their good correlations with temperature. In the three climates, long‐wave irradiance is the main source of energy, but its variability is small and poorly correlated to the temperature mainly because cloud emissions dominate its variability.

While the physical dimensions of climate change are now routinely assessed through multimodel intercomparisons, projected impacts on the global ocean ecosystem generally rely on individual models with a specific set of assumptions. To address these single-model limitations, we present standardized ensemble projections from six global marine ecosystem models forced with two Earth system models and four emission scenarios with and without fishing. We derive average biomass trends and associated uncertainties across the marine food web. Without fishing, mean global animal biomass decreased by 5% (±4% SD) under low emissions and 17% (±11% SD) under high emissions by 2100, with an average 5% decline for every 1 °C of warming. Projected biomass declines were primarily driven by increasing temperature and decreasing primary production, and were more pronounced at higher trophic levels, a process known as trophic amplification. Fishing did not substantially alter the effects of climate change. Considerable regional variation featured strong biomass increases at high latitudes and decreases at middle to low latitudes, with good model agreement on the direction of change but variable magnitude. Uncertainties due to variations in marine ecosystem and Earth system models were similar. Ensemble projections performed well compared with empirical data, emphasizing the benefits of multimodel inference to project future outcomes. Our results indicate that global ocean animal biomass consistently declines with climate change, and that these impacts are amplified at higher trophic levels. Next steps for model development include dynamic scenarios of fishing, cumulative human impacts, and the effects of management measures on future ocean biomass trends.

The present research work concerns development of regression models to predict the monthly heating demand for single-family residential sector in temperate climates, with the aim to be used by architects or design engineers as support tools in the very first stage of their projects in finding efficiently energetic solutions. Another interest to use such simplified models is to make it possible a very quick parametric study in order to optimize the building structure versus environmental or economic criteria. All the energy prediction models were based on an extended database obtained by dynamic simulations for 16 major cities of France. The inputs for the regression models are the building shape factor, the building envelope U-value, the window to floor area ratio, the building time constant and the climate which is defined as function of the sol-air temperature and heating set-point. If the neural network (NN) methods could give precise representations in predicting energy use, with the advantage that they are capable of adjusting themselves to unexpected pattern changes in the incoming data, the multiple regression analysis was also found to be an efficient method, nevertheless with the requirement that an extended database should be used for the regression. The validation is probably the most important level when trying to find prediction models, so 270 different scenarios are analysed in this research work for different inputs of the models. It has been established that the energy equations obtained can do predictions quite well, a maximum deviation between the predicted and the simulated is noticed to be 5.1% for Nice climate, with an average error of 2%. In this paper, we also show that is possible to predict the building heating demand even for more complex scenarios, when the construction is adjacent to non-heated spaces, basements or roof attics.