Research
Paleoclimate Modeling
The primary purpose of PaleoTerra is to model past climate. Models of past climates serve as tools for understanding Earth's climate system and systems that are impacted by climate, such as erosion and sedimentation. PaleoTerra, so far, has produced models from four periods in Earth history under a wide range of conditions.
Model/Data Comparisons
Climate models are useless without observations of climate for analyses. For today's world, climatologists have a wide variety of tools and data sources for model/data comparisons. For the past, instead of direct observations, we depend on indirect observations contained in the geologic record, such as sediments and fossils. The process of comparing a climate model result with such data are difficult. Thus, PaleoTerra is interested in bringing many data processing techniques, including neural networks and cluster analysis, into the model/data comparison tool kit to better evaluate climate model performance.