USGS Open-File Report 94-023
Introduction: USGS Workshop on Pliocene Terrestrial Environments and Data/Model Comparisons
- Robert S. Thompson
- U.S. Geological Survey, Denver, CO
Over the last several years, the U.S. Geological Survey's PRISM (Pliocene
Research, Interpretation, and Synoptic Mapping Project) project has
accumulated information for a "snapshot" description of global marine and
terrestrial conditions for the mid Pliocene, the last period in Earth
history when globally warm conditions persisted over hundreds of thousands
of years. PRISM researchers and collaborators are analyzing time series
of environmental changes both marine and nonmarine settings to determine
the amplitude and periodicity of Pliocene climatic changes, and are
assembling gridded data sets of vegetation cover to provide boundary
conditions for General Circulation Model (GCM) simulations. Palynological
and other terrestrial data will also being employed in validation
exercises of Pliocene climate simulations provided by researchers using
Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) and NCAR (National Center for
Atmospheric Research) GCMs.
As part of this effort, the U.S. Geological Survey Global Change and
Climate History Program sponsored a workshop on "Pliocene Terrestrial
Environments and Data/Model Comparisons," which was held in Herndon,
Virginia, on May 22 and 23, 1993. This report presents the abstracts from
the Herndon workshop. The primary objectives of this meeting were to
review the available data on mid-Pliocene terrestrial environments, and to
provide a forum for geological researchers and climate modelers to discuss
the uses of palynological and other terrestrial environmental data in
initializing and validating GCM simulations of past climates.
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