NOAA/WDS Paleoclimatology - Huang and Pollack Global Database of Borehole Temperatures and Climate Reconstructions

This project has as its goal the design, assembly, analysis and interpretation of geothermal observations on continents relevant to understanding the nature and causes of climate change over the past five centuries. The project was inititated by the Geothermal Laboratory of the University of Michigan, USA. Important collaborations have been developed with the Geophysical Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences, and with a working group of the International Heat Flow Commission of IASPEI. Funding for this project has come from the U.S. National Science Foundation, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Intenational Geological Correlation Program, and the Czech - U.S. Science and Technology Program. The principal components of the database are:

Basic geothermal observations from field surveys and laboratory measurements, principally comprising borehole temperature logs and thermophysical properties. This section includes data only from boreholes at least 200 m deep. The data listed are restricted to the range 20-600 meters. Data above 20 m have been omitted because they include annual variability, and data below 600 m have not been included because they contain no information about the past 500 years. Quality control measures have occasionally required the deletion of other data within the 20-600 m range.
A five-century ground surface temperature history derived for each site by a standardized inversion procedure operating on the basic observations. The derived history is presented as century-long temperature trends for each of the past five centuries. This representation emphasizes longer term variations of the climate history, and thus is complementary to high resolution proxies such as tree rings, ice cores, corals and lake sediments.
The name of the person who can be contacted to learn more about the data and the site. This is either the name of the original investigator who made the observations, or the name of a regional or national data compiler. Some data remain proprietary, and therefore are not accessible directly from this database. Database users desiring access to these data should request the data directly from the person listed as the data contact. A list of investigators engaged in climate studies involving geothermal data can be found at the original web site of this database at the University of Michigan.

Additional citations for this database are:

Huang, S., Pollack, H. N., and Shen, P.Y., 2000. Temperature trends over the past five centuries reconstructed from borehole temperatures. Nature, 403: 756-758.
Pollack, H.N., Huang, S., and Shen, P.Y., 1998. Climate Change Record in Subsurface Temperatures A Global Perspective. Science, 282 279-281.