Reconstructing Late Holocene North Atlantic atmospheric circulation changes using functional paleoclimate networks

Abstract

In this paper, the authors use a network approach to investigate climate teleconnec-tions across the North Atlantic region during the Common Era and relate climate in this region to the NAO. The authors take an interesting approach toward utilizing published paleoclimate records for reconstructing a regionally important climate index. I agree with the other Referees that this work should be published with some modifications outlined below. I am in agreement with Referee 1 who suggests that the authors take a more "peda-gogical" approach toward describing their methodology. Whenever possible, relating the purpose of equations in words as well, providing definitions for all variables, and including a table of variables that readers can refer back to would help to clarify the C1

Reconstructing Late Holocene North Atlantic atmospheric circulation changes using functional paleoclimate networks

“…S4. The explicit values of all CLDs are given in Franke et al (2017). The corresponding results further demonstrate that the presence of strong west-east connections is indicative of a positive NAO phase, while north-south connections, especially between CEU and the rest of the network, point toward negative NAO phases.…”

“…The results of this probabilistic description are shown in Fig. 6 and detailed in Franke et al (2017). We find that during the Common Era, there have been several phases during which the multi-decadal NAO variability was preferentially characterized by a positive phase (e.g.…”

“…The corresponding references and data citations are provided in Table S2. The obtained qualitative NAO reconstruction is provided as part of the Supplement accompanying this paper and is additionally available via the data repository PANGAEA (Franke et al, 2017).…”

“…Specifically, most of the records studied in this work have been derived from either tree rings, varved lake sediments, or ice cores, all of which have been dated rather precisely (for estimates of the dating uncertainty of some of the selected records, see e.g. Werner et al, 2017). Thus, age uncertainty is considered to be negligible in the following.…”

“…In addition, there exist also some very long historical temperature records based upon early instrumental records (see references in the Supplement Tables S1 and S2). Many of the available proxies are strongly correlated to seasonal or annual temperature variability and thus have been used as key input for existing regional (Werner et al, 2017;Luterbacher et al, 2016;PAGES 2k Consortium, 2013) and hemispheric (Ljungqvist et al, 2012;Mann et al, 2008) Tables S1 and S2. nium, a considerably lower number spans the full Common Era at high resolution.…”