Climate Archives

Understanding future climate changes depends on knowledge of past fluctuations in the climate system. Reliable measurement series of climate data from a few regions of the Earth cover only the last 150 years, so that only a very narrow window of climate history is accessible. In order to analyse climate fluctuations of different lengths and distances, fundamentally different information on the facts of climate changes and on the possible influencing factors is used, which is available in nature in different systems. These systems are called climate archives and have been successfully studied and evaluated by climate researchers for many years. For a system to be suitable as an archive, information from the climate system must be recorded regularly and stored in a form that is not subject to long-term changes. Here, the most important terrestrial and marine climate archives are presented and critically examined with respect to their importance for climate research. Attention is drawn to uncertainties, hypotheses, assumptions, etc. in the interpretation of archives, whether marine or terrestrial.