Abstract. Palaeoclimate data hold the unique promise of providing a long-term
perspective on climate change and as such can serve as an important
benchmark for climate models. However, palaeoclimate data have generally
been archived with insufficient standardisation and metadata to allow for
transparent and consistent uncertainty assessment in an automated way.
Thanks to improved computation capacity, transient palaeoclimate simulations
are now possible, calling for data products containing multi-parameter time
series rather than information on a single parameter for a single time
slice. Efforts are underway to simulate a complete glacial–interglacial
cycle using general circulation models (https://www.palmod.de/, last access: 6 May 2020), and to confront these
simulations with palaeoclimate data, we have compiled a multi-parameter
marine palaeoclimate data synthesis that contains time series spanning 0 to
130 000 years ago. We present the first version of the data product that
focuses exclusively on time series for which a robust chronology based on
benthic foraminifera δ18O and radiocarbon dating is available.
The product contains 896 time series of eight palaeoclimate parameters from
143 individual sites, each associated with rich metadata, age–depth model
ensembles, and information to refine and update the chronologies. This
version contains 205 time series of benthic foraminifera δ18O;
169 of benthic foraminifera δ13C; 131 of seawater temperature;
174 and 119 of planktonic foraminifera δ18O and δ13C; and 44, 38 and 16 of carbonate, organic carbon and biogenic silica
content, respectively. The data product is available in three formats (R,
LiPD and netCDF) facilitating use across different software and operating
systems and can be downloaded at https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.908831 (Jonkers et al., 2019). This
data descriptor presents our data synthesis strategy and describes the
contents and format of the data product in detail. It ends with a set of
recommendations for data archiving.