Reconstructed upper-ocean temperature, salinity, and sea ice at the Last Glacial Maximum

These data accompany the published article

Amrhein, D. E., Wunsch, C., Marchal, O., & Forget, G. (2018). A global glacial ocean state estimate constrained by upper-ocean temperature proxies. Journal of Climate, 31(19), 8059-8079. https://doi.org/10.1175/JCLI-D-17-0769.1

Seasonal reconstructions of upper-ocean temperatures, salinity, and sea ice concentrations from Amrhein et al. (2018). Two sets of fields are available: GLACIAL, from the last glacial maximum ocean state estimation, and MODERN, from a similar model configuration but run to quasi-equilibrium under modern forcing conditions. GLACIAL minus MODERN anomaly values are likely to be more robust than standalone values from GLACIAL because of ocean drifts over millennial time scales present in both GLACIAL and MODERN. See publication for further information. See the MITgcm documentation for additional details on model variables.

Files in Amrhein_etal_2018_LGM_MODERN_area_heff_seasonal.mat are:

lat: Vector of latitudes
lon: Vector of longitudes
lgm_areai_seas: Monthly maps of fractional sea ice area estimated at the LGM
lgm_heffi_seas: Monthly maps of sea ice thickness estimated at the LGM
mod_areai_seas: Monthly maps of fractional sea ice area simulated for modern climate
mod_heffi_seas: Monthly maps of sea ice thickness simulated for modern climate

Files in Amrhein_etal_2018_LGM_MODERN_T_SST_seasonal.mat are:

lat: Vector of latitudes
lon: Vector of longitudes
lgm_Si_seas: Monthly maps of upper-ocean salinity estimated at the LGM
lgm_Ti_seas: Monthly maps of upper-ocean temperature estimated at the LGM
mod_Si_seas: Monthly maps of upper-ocean salinity simulated for modern climate
mod_Ti_seas: Monthly maps of upper-ocean temperature simulated for modern climate

A simple plot of, e.g., estimated LGM January upper-ocean temperatures can be made in MATLAB by putting the file in your working directory and running

load Amrhein_etal_2018_LGM_MODERN_T_SST_seasonal.mat
pcolor(lon,lat,lgm_Si_seas(:,:,1)),shading flat

These data are a subset of those generated in the full state estimate. If additional variables are needed, please contact damrhein@ucar.edu and I can update this repository.