Southern South America Multiproxy 500 Year Precipitation Reconstructions 
----------------------------------------------------------------------- 
               World Data Center for Paleoclimatology, Boulder 
                                  and 
                     NOAA Paleoclimatology Program 
----------------------------------------------------------------------- 
NOTE: PLEASE CITE ORIGINAL REFERENCE WHEN USING THIS DATA!!!!! 


NAME OF DATA SET: 
Southern South America Multiproxy 500 Year Precipitation Reconstructions 
LAST UPDATE: 8/2010 (Original receipt by WDC Paleo) 
CONTRIBUTORS: Neukom, R., J. Luterbacher, R. Villalba, M. Küttel, 
D. Frank, P.D. Jones, M. Grosjean, J. Esper, L. Lopez, and H. Wanner 

IGBP PAGES/WDCA CONTRIBUTION SERIES NUMBER: 2010-077 

WDC PALEO CONTRIBUTION SERIES CITATION: 
Neukom, R., et al. 2010. 
Southern South America Multiproxy 500 Year Precipitation Reconstructions. 
IGBP PAGES/World Data Center for Paleoclimatology 
Data Contribution Series # 2010-077. 
NOAA/NCDC Paleoclimatology Program, Boulder CO, USA. 


ORIGINAL REFERENCE: 
Neukom, R., J. Luterbacher, R. Villalba, M. Küttel, D. Frank, 
P.D. Jones, M. Grosjean, J. Esper, L. Lopez, and H. Wanner. 2010. 
Multi-centennial summer and winter precipitation variability 
in southern South America. 
Geophys. Res. Lett., 37, L14708, doi:10.1029/2010GL043680. 

ABSTRACT: 
We present the first spatially and temporally highly resolved gridded 
reconstruction of multi-centennial precipitation variability for 
southern South America (SSA).  A novel reconstruction approach of 
deriving 10,000 ensemble members based on varying predictor networks 
and methodological settings allows the identification of spatiotemporal 
changes in SSA precipitation and associated uncertainties. The summer 
and winter reconstructions back to AD 1498 and AD 1590, respectively, 
provide new evidence for multi-centennial increase in summer 
precipitation and an opposing decrease in winter precipitation into 
the 20th century. The drying in winter is significant over large parts 
of SSA, whereas the patterns for summer, possibly representing convective 
rainfall, have displayed high spatial variability. The fact that such 
long-term seasonal and spatial changes have occurred in the past, 
underlines the complex form that hydroclimatic variability might have 
in the future. This emphasizes the need for careful adaptation strategies 
as governments become attuned to the realities of climate change. 


GEOGRAPHIC REGION: Southern South America 
PERIOD OF RECORD: 1498 - 1995 AD 
  
FUNDING SOURCES: 
RN is supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation through 
the NCCR Climate. JL acknowledges support by the EU/FP6 integrated 
project CIRCE (Climate Change and Impact Research: the Mediterranean 
Environment; #036961), from the EU/FP7 project ACQWA (Assessing Climate 
Impacts on the Quantity and Quality of Water, #212250) and from the 
DFG Project PRIME (PRecipitation In the past Millennium in Europe) 
within the Priority Program 'INTERDYNAMIK'. 



DESCRIPTION: 
This dataset contains the austral summer (DJF) and winter (JJA) 
precipitation reconstructions for southern South America (SSA) 
as presented in Neukom et al. 2010.  The data are medians of an 
ensemble of 10,000 reconstructions derived using PCR reconstruction 
technique (details see paper) and cover the following periods: 
Summer: 1498-1995
Winter: 1590-1995

The predictor network consists of 33 (31) proxy records and 41 (42) 
instrumental series for summer (winter).

The spatially explicit reconstructions are provided in 0.5°x0.5°
resolution and in NetCDF and text format:
Summer: 
SSA_PP_Recon_DJF_anom_1498-1995.nc 
SSA_PP_Recon_DJF_anom_1498-1995.txt 
Winter: 
SSA_PP_Recon_JJA_anom_1590-1995.nc 
SSA_PP_Recon_JJA_anom_1590-1995.txt 

The text file contain the following columns: 
Year, Precipitation anomalies wrt 1931-1995 [mm] of grid-cell 1, 
precipitation anomalies of grid-cell 2, ... , 
precipitation anomalies of grid-cell 9191 

The grid cells are structured as follows: 
There are 9191 cells representing 101 longitudes (80.25°W to 30.25°W) 
and 91 latitudes (64.75°S to 19.75°S) 

Cell 1 represents the southwestern corner of the area (80.25°W,64.75°S) 
Cell 2 represents the next cell eastward of cell 1 (79.75°W,64.75°S) 
...
Cell 101 represent the southeastern corner of the area (30.25°W,64.75°S) 
Cell 102 represents the coordinates (80.25°W,64.25°S) 
...
Cell 9191 represents the northeastern corner of the area (30.25°W,19.75°S) 

Only the land-gridcells (2358 cells) contain data, all other cells have 
"NA" values.
Some of the land gridcells have also missing values (mainly in the 
Atacama region), because the std. dev. at these locations is <0.1 
in the instrumental calibration grid and the corresponding grid cells 
were not included into the reconstructions.