KNMI Climate Explorer: A web-based research tool for high-resolution paleoclimatology

Abstract

Climate Explorer (www.climexp.knmi.nl) is a web-based application for climatic research that is managed by the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI) and contains a comprehensive collection of climatic data sets and analysis tools. One of its fields of application is high-resolution paleoclimatology. We show how Climate Explorer can be used to explore and download available instrumental climate data and derived time series, to examine the climatic signal in uploaded high-resolution paleoclimate time series, and to investigate the temporal and spatial characteristics of climate reconstructions. We further demonstrate the value of Climate Explorer for high-resolution paleoclimate research using a dendroclimatic data set from the High Atlas Mountains in Morocco.