ALBERT

Description: Mediterranean climates are characterized by strong seasonal contrasts between dry summers and wet winters. Changes in winter rainfall are critical for regional socioeconomic development, but are difficult to simulate accurately and reconstruct on Quaternary timescales. This is partly because regional hydroclimate records that cover multiple glacial–interglacial cycles with different orbital geometries, global ice volume and atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations are scarce. Moreover, the underlying mechanisms of change and their persistence remain unexplored. Here we show that, over the past 1.36 million years, wet winters in the northcentral Mediterranean tend to occur with high contrasts in local, seasonal insolation and a vigorous African summer monsoon. Our proxy time series from Lake Ohrid on the Balkan Peninsula, together with a 784,000-year transient climate model hindcast, suggest that increased sea surface temperatures amplify local cyclone development and refuel North Atlantic low-pressure systems that enter the Mediterranean during phases of low continental ice volume and high concentrations of atmospheric greenhouse gases. A comparison with modern reanalysis data shows that current drivers of the amount of rainfall in the Mediterranean share some similarities to those that drive the reconstructed increases in precipitation. Our data cover multiple insolation maxima and are therefore an important benchmark for testing climate model performance.

Description: The aim of TERENO (TERrestrial ENvironmental Observatories) is to collect long-term observation data on the hydrosphere, biosphere, pedosphere, lower atmosphere and anthroposphere along multiple spatial and temporal gradients in climate sensitive regions across Germany. The lysimeter-network SOILCan was installed as a part of TERENO between March and December 2010 within the four observatories. It represents a long-term large-scale experiment to study the effects of climate and management changes in terrestrial ecosystems, with particular focus on the impact of these changes on water, energy and matter fluxes into groundwater and atmosphere. SOILCan primarily focuses on soil hydrology, the carbon and nutrient cycle and plant species diversity. Time series measurements of states and fluxes at high spatial and temporal resolution in the soil and biosphere are combined with remote sensing information for the development and calibration of process-based models simulating impacts of climate change in soil processes at field to regional scale. Within the framework of SOILCan, 132 fully automated lysimeter systems were installed at 14 highly equipped experimental field sites across the four TERENO observatories. Relevant state variables of grassland and arable ecosystems are monitored characterizing climate, hydrology and matter fluxes into the atmosphere and within the hydrosphere as well as plant species diversity. Lysimeters are either being operated at or near their original sampling location or were transferred within or between the four TERENO observatories thereby using temperature and rainfall gradients to mimic future climatic conditions (space for time), which allow measuring impacts of climate change on terrestrial ecosystems. The lysimeters are cultivated as grassland (intensive, extensive and non-used) or arable land, the latter with a standardized crop rotation of winter wheat—winter barley—winter rye—oat. This publication describes the general design of the SOILCan experiment including a comprehensive description of the pedological characteristics of the different sites and presents a few exemplary results from the first years of operation.