Tamara Fletcher

I am a palaeoclimatologist and palaeoecologist with a focus on Arctic amplification of temperature. The Arctic is warming at 4x the global average, tracking or exceeding our most extreme climate model scenarios and the source of this error is unknown. Applying these same models to warm periods of the past, and testing them against climate reconstructions, allows us to investigate why they may be insensitive to Arctic warming. This will ultimately improve climate model prediction for policy and climate impact mitigation. This question has led to me to apply a broad range of palaeoclimate and palaeoecological reconstruction methods, using the remains of organisms from the past; from fire and cloud reconstruction, to beetles, molluscs, and plants as indicators of their climate, I take a systems approach to understanding our past, to better our future.

Central to this, is the interdisciplinary pursuit of data-model comparison. I am the lead of the Neoegene Terrestrial Climate group in the PAGES working group PlioMioVAR working toward a synthesis of Neogene terrestrial climate records; the terrestrial data representative on the PlioMIP3 steering committee; and a founding member of the PoLAR-FIT working group.