Peter Huybers cv

Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences
Harvard University
20 Oxford St., Cambridge, MA 02138 USA
phuybers@fas.harvard.edu
phone (617)495-8391
fax (617)384-7396



Papers
  • Tingley and Huybers, A Bayesian Algorithm for Reconstructing Climate Anomalies in Space and Time. Part 1: Development and applications to paleoclimate reconstruction problems, Journal of Climate, accepted (pdf). A zipped package of Matlab files that implements the method can be downloaded from Martin's website.
  • Tingley and Huybers, A Bayesian Algorithm for Reconstructing Climate Anomalies in Space and Time. Part 2: Comparison with the regularized expectation-maximization algorithm, Journal of Climate, accepted. pdf
  • Huybers and Wunsch, Paleo-Physical Oceanography with an Emphasis on Transport Rates, Annual Review of Marine Science, in press. pdf
  • Haam and Huybers, A test for the presence of covariance between time-uncertain series of data with application to the Dongge Cave speleothem and atmospheric radiocarbon records, Paleoceanography, in press. pdf
  • Huybers, Pleistocene glacial variability as a chaotic response to obliquity forcing , Climate of the Past, 2009. pdf
  • Huybers and Langmuir, Feedback between deglaciation, volcanism, and atmospheric CO2 , Earth and Planetary Science Letters, 2009. pdf and supplementary data
  • Perron and Huybers, Is there an orbital signal in the polar layered deposits on Mars? , Geology, 2009. pdf and a news piece
  • Huybers and Denton, Antarctic temperature at orbital time scales controlled by local summer duration, Nature Geoscience, 2008. pdf and supplementary material
  • Huybers and Tziperman, Integrated summer insolation forcing and 40,000 year glacial cycles: the perspective from an icesheet/energy-balance model, Paleoceanography, 2008. pdf and code
  • Huybers and Molnar, Tropical cooling and the onset of North American glaciation, Climate of the Past, 2007. pdf
  • Huybers, Gebbie, and Marchal, Can paleoceanographic tracers constrain meridional circulation rates?, Journal of Physical Oceanography, 2007. pdf
  • Gebbie and Huybers, Meridional circulation during the Last Glacial Maximum explored through a combination of South Atlantic d18O observations and a geostrophic inverse model, G-cubed, 2006. pdf
  • Tziperman, Raymo, Huybers, and Wunsch, Consequences of pacing the Pleistocene 100 kyr ice ages by nonlinear phase locking to Milankovitch forcing, Paleoceanography, 2006. pdf
  • Huybers and Curry, Links between annual, Milankovitch, and continuum temperature variability, Nature, 2006. pdf and supplemental material
  • Huybers and Wunsch, Obliquity pacing of the late Pleistocene glacial terminations, Nature, 2005. pdf
  • Huybers and Wunsch, A depth-derived Pleistocene age-model: uncertainty estimates, sedimentation variability, and nonlinear climate change, Paleoceanography, 2004. pdf
  • Huybers and Wunsch, Rectification and precession-period signals in the climate system, Geophysical Research Letters, 2003. pdf

Comments etc.
  • Huybers, Antarctica's orbital beat, Science, 2009. pdf
  • Raymo and Huybers, Unlocking the mysterires of the ice ages, Nature, 2008. pdf
  • Huybers, comment on ``Hockey sticks, principal components, and spurious significance'' by McIntyre and McKitrick [2005], Geophysical Research Letters, 2005. pdf and supplemental material (An edited version of this paper was published by AGU. Copyright 2005 American Geophysical Union.)
  • Huybers, Comments on: 'Coupling of the hemispheres in observations and simulations of glacial climate change': by A. Schmittner, O.A. Saenko, and A.J. Weaver [Quaternary Science Reviews 22 (2003) 659-671], Quaternary Science Reviews, 2004. pdf

Manuscripts
  • Huybers, Compensation between model feedbacks and curtailment of climate sensitivity, submitted. pdf
  • Gebbie and Huybers, Resolving the spectrum of ocean water masses, submitted. pdf
  • Tingley and Huybers, The spatial mean and dispersion of surface temperatures over the last 1200 years: warm intervals are also variable intervals , submitted. pdf

Research
    Glacial cycles. Over the last three million years the amount of ice on the Earth has alternately waxed so as to cover much of the northern continents and waned to the relatively ice-free conditions we have today. The cause of these massive shifts in climate remains unclear, not for lack of hypotheses, of which there are many, but instead for lack of any single compelling theory. Thus, one aim is to distinguish between the many competing glacial hypotheses (HW05). Another aim is to explore the causes of glaciation during the Pliocene and early Pleistocene, associated with seemingly more simple 40,000 year variations in ice-volume (H06, HT08). It appears clear that changes in Earth's obliquity pace glacial cycles (HW05, H07), and am working on testing the extent to which the precession of the equinoxes is also involved. High resolution imagery and topography from Mars offers another test and perspective on our understanding of the orbital influence on glaciation, though the results we can arrive at with present data are far from definitive (PH09). It has become increasingly clear that we will not understand the glacial cycles until we also understand the accompanying changes in atmospheric CO2. The glacial/interglacial changes in CO2 may not only involve the organic and marine carbon pools, but also the vast reservoir of carbon in Earth's interion, in that glacial unloading appears to radically increase global volcanic activity during the deglaciation and, thus, volcanic emissions of CO2 (HL_submitted). Further examples of interactions between glaciation and other parts of Earth's climate include that the initiation of Northern Hemisphere glaciation may have been caused by long term cooling in the Eastern Equatorial Pacific (e.g.~HM07), and that Antarctica's response to insolation forcing seems to mirror and may reinforce the Northern response (HD08).
    The annual cycle. The annual cycle in surface temperature is massive, larger than even the glacial-interglacial cycles in most places on Earth, and even small changes in its amplitude and timing can have large consequences. It appears that over the last fifty years the annual cycle on land has been trending earlier (SHF_2009), a shift not reproduced by any of the IPCC models, and possibly related to surface drying, shifts in atmospheric circulation, or changes in the absorptivity of the atmosphere. Changes in Earth's orbital configuration also alter Earth's annual cycle of insolation. For example, the precession of the equinoxes acts to modulate both the duration of the seasons and the associated intensity of solar insolation. Counter-balancing between these two precessional effects may account for the apparent lack of precession-period variability in ice volume during the early Pleistocene (H06). Note that variations in how the seasonal cycle is recorded in the climate record can also strongly influence that record (HW03). Climatic variations spanning timescales from months to centuries also appear related to the annual cycle, following a power-law relationship which is itself proportional the amplitude of the annual cycle (HC06).
    Reconstruction of past climate states. Instrumental records of climate are increasingly sparse back in time, so that tracing out the history of past temperature variability requires the use of climate proxies, derived from ice, rock, sediment, and biological records. How best to determine spatial average quantities, such as temperature, from these proxies has been the subject of some debate (e.g. H05). Martin Tingley and I are working on a Bayesian Hierarchical model to estimate spatial average temperature from noisy proxies of local temperature variability (TH_submitted part 1, part 2). Another topic of inquiry is to understand how changes in the mean temperature correspond with its variability (TH_submitted). Similarly, reconstruction of the past ocean state allows us to gage the natural range and modes of ocean circulation, in principle permits testing of our models over a wider range of conditions, and helps place modern changes in context, but is challenging (e.g. HGM06, GH07). Jake Gebbie and I are in the process of combining a wide array of modern and paleoceanographic observations to understand how the distribution of the ocean's water mass properties has shifted through time (GH_submitted), and are now also exploring the disequilibrium of modern ocean temperatures. A review with Carl Wunsch of the rates of ocean circulation during the Last Glacial Maximum was recently completed (HW_inpress).
    Time and its uncertainty. Time-uncertainty is ubiquitous and of a degree that cannot be ignored in many paleoclimate and geologic applications. One theme has been to develop a chronology of Pleistocene glaciation which is independent of orbital assumptions (HW04, H07), along with estimates of the associated time-uncertainty. Another theme is to explore how time-uncertain influences statistical analyses of the climate record (HW04, PH09). Eddie Haam has developed an extreme value method to test for the relationship between time-uncertain records (HH_submitted). The handling of time-uncertainty seems one of the more pressing, yet less developed, problems in paleoclimate.
    Statistical Methods. To make progress on the above problems its been useful to develop various new techniques. Working in collaboration, Jake Gebbie developed a Total Matrix Inversion method (TMI, almost too much information) that estimates how every point in the ocean relates to every other point from a wide variety of tracer data, and permits for exploration of ocean transport, heat and carbon uptake, and transit times. Martin Tingley developed a Bayesian Algorithm for Reconstructing Spatially Arrayed Temperatures (BARSAT, SAT) that permits for combining instrumental and various proxy data to determine past temperature fields, and which is being extended to include precipitation and other climate variables. Eddie Haam developed a test for the Maximum Covariance between Time uncErtain Series (MCTEST, which speaks for itself) for assessing whether time-uncertain proxy records are related to one another.

Teaching (spring semester, 2009)

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    Faculty Assistant: Robert Henry (617)495-8839, henry@eps.harvard.edu.

Last updated in August, 2009.
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