cc: k.briffa@uea.ac.uk, jan.barkmeijer@knmi.nl, weber@knmi.nl date: Tue, 10 Aug 2004 11:02:22 +0100 from: RAPID@wpo.nerc.ac.uk subject: Research Grant Reference: NE/C509507/1 - Research Grant to: t.osborn@uea.ac.uk Dear Dr Osborn PROJECT TITLE: To what extent was the Little Ice Age a result of a change in the thermohaline circulation? Your application for the above Research Grant will be considered at the Rapid Climate Change (RCC) Steering committee meeting. Referee comments have now been obtained on the application, and have included the following points to which you have been invited to respond. These comments are presented to you for clarification and do not represent any pre-judgement of the outcome of your application, and may be untypical of the general tone of review received. Should you wish to respond to the points raised by the referees, please do so by 18/08/2004 to allow us to include your response in the papers sent to the committee reviewing your application. We realise that this is a short period of time and would encourage you to submit your response by e-mail. Please make sure that you include your grant reference number. Please note that NERC is now introducing a page restriction on the length of your response. Your reply should be as concise as possible and must not exceed an average of one side of A4 for each referee assessment. For example, should you receive 3 sets of referee comments, your response should not exceed 3 sides of A4, with a minimum text font size 12. Please note that any response longer than the page limit will not be put to the Panel Meeting. This e-mail has been copied to the all Investigators on the application in case the Principal Investigator (PI) is out of contact. However, please note that we can only accept one response to these comments (preferably from the PI) - not one from each Investigator contacted. Should we receive further referee comments we will endeavour to forward these to you for comment before the meeting. Please note however, that these late comments may have alternative deadlines for response, due to meeting paper reproduction schedules, which you should attempt to meet wherever possible. No guarantee can be made that late responses will be included in the main set of meeting papers. Yours sincerely Sandra Moss Research Grants Team NERC Tel: (01793) 411558 Fax: (01793) 411545 E-Mail: RAPID@wpo.nerc.ac.uk Please refer to http://www.nerc.ac.uk/funding/contacts.shtml if you need to contact individuals within NERC. Referee A What are the proposal's particular strengths? Provide justification for the grades given above. Continue on a separate sheet if necessary. While it is not obvious that the Little Ice Age (LIA) can be called "rapid" climate change, the investigation of potential causes of the LIA is scientifically very interesting and important, and clearly merits inclusion in the call for proposals in the Rapid Climate Change program. The particular strength of the proposal lies in the combination of expertise from i) paleoclimatology, ii) climate modeling and iii) data assimilation. The proposed series of experiments to test various hypotheses (LIA forcing through THC weakening, low NAO, low solar radiation or increased volcanism) has a good chance of determining the consistency of one or more of the possible mechanisms with the observed record, in particular for the first two mechanisms on which most of the effort is directed. The idea to use singular vectors to force an atmospheric model into a prescribed state of the NAO is novel and very attractive. The research teams in both places are well qualified, have a very good reputation and an ideal complementary mix of expertise. What are the proposal's particular weaknesses? Provide justification for the grades given above. Continue on a separate sheet if necessary. Using freshwater forcing to weaken the THC will work. However, unless there is any evidence of increased melting prior or during the LIA, this has some aspects of invoking a deus ex machina. With regard to solar and volcanic forcing, there is little mention of previous work. In particular, a discussion as to how accurate these forcings can be reconstructed would be very useful. Referee B Different hypotheses about possible causes of the Little Ice Age will be examined using 2 different kind of models. The proposal fits with the programme to understand past rapid climate change. The evaluation of forcing factors in climate change, and the comparison with data will enhance our ability to understand present and possible future changes. The proposal complements earlier work of the proponents. The cross-national initiative brings the expertise in fully coupled models, EMICs, and statistical analyses together. A weakness of the proposal is the use of the DATUN technique which is associated with time consuming programing work and which has not been shown to be useful for paleoclimatic applications. This technique is until now only documented in gray literature, see ref 21,43,44. In my oppinion, the scientific work can be done without DATUN, and the NERC part can therefore be reduced from 31.9 months to 20 months. The proposed PostDoc (KNMI) and the team are highly qualified for the project.