Climate of the Past Discussions www.clim-past-discuss.net 1814-9340 1814-9359 4 5 2008 10.5194/cpd-4-1089-2008 http://www.clim-past-discuss.net/4/1089/2008/ http://www.clim-past-discuss.net/4/1089/2008/cpd-4-1089-2008.html http://www.clim-past-discuss.net/4/1089/2008/cpd-4-1089-2008.pdf 1089 1113 2008-10-01 Two millennia of climate variability in the Central Mediterranean C. Taricco taricco@ph.unito.it M. Ghil G. Vivaldo Dipartimento di Fisica Generale, University of Torino, Torino, Italy Istituto di Fisica dello Spazio Interplanetario-INAF, University of Torino, Torino, Italy Département Terre-Atmosphère-Océan & Laboratoire de Météorologie Dynamique (CNRS and IPSL), Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris, France Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics, University of California, Los Angeles, CA, USA This experimental work addresses the need for high-resolution, long and homogeneous climatic time series that facilitate the study of climate variability over time scales of decades to millennia. We present a high-resolution record of foraminiferal δ¹⁸O from a Central Mediterranean sediment core that covers the last two millennia. The record was analyzed using advanced spectral methods and shows highly significant oscillatory components with periods of roughly 600, 350, 200, 125 and 11 years. 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