An international team led by McGill University researchers has devised a way to improve the accuracy of climate change models for the Global South by integrating historical records kept by missionaries and other visitors.
An international team led by McGill University researchers has devised a way to improve the accuracy of climate change models for the Global South by integrating historical records kept by missionaries and other visitors.
To show how it could be done, a cross-disciplinary team of researchers that included climate scientists, data analysts and a historian integrated data from 19th century missionary archives in Tanzania with current data for the region provided by climate modellers. They devised a way to quantify the historic records, which tended to be anecdotal as opposed to scientifically recorded. The result was to provide a longer record of climate change in the region than had previously been available, which has the capacity to enhance the accuracy of climate change models. Their work was published recently in Climate of the Past.
“The general scientific neglect of the Global South is only now starting to be gradually corrected by institutions in these regions,” explained Philip Gooding, a researcher at McGill’s Indian Ocean World Centre and the lead author of the study. “Tanzania is typical of many tropical regions in the Global South, in that evidence of climatic changes before the mid-20th century has yet to be gathered or analyzed.” Gooding said. “This is partly because climate change research is often more difficult in such regions. For example, it is difficult to conduct tree ring analysis in tropical regions because many tropical species do not provide annual rings, or they respond differently to climate variability. Meanwhile, analysis of lake sediments suggests multi-decadal trends, rather than annual or seasonal climatic conditions.” So, he said, researchers looked to historical documents.
Read More: McGill University
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