Characterizing the Statistical Properties and Global Distribution of Dansgaard-Oeschger Events

Salt Lake Community College Student Center

Ice core records from Greenland have shown times of rapid warming during the most recent glacial period, called Dansgaard-Oeschger (D-O) events. D-O events are important to our understanding of both past climate systems and modern climate volatility. In this paper, we present new approaches for sta- tistically evaluating the existence of cyclicity in D-O events and the possible lagged correlation between the Greenland and Antarctica temperature records. Speci cally, we consider permutation testing and bootstrapping methodologies for assessing the cyclicity of D-O events and the correlation between the Green- land and Antarctica records. We nd that there is not enough evidence to conclude that D-O events are cyclical; however, the Antarctica record leads the Greenland record by 545 years with a statistically signi cant correlation of 0.455.