Diatom-based sea-surface temperatures over the last 40 kyrs in sediment core MD11-3353 off Kerguelen Island, Southern Ocean

Diatom census counts were used to quantitatively estimate summer sea-surface temperatures (SST) over the last 40,000 years in core MD11-3353, collected in 2011 on board the R.V. Marion Dusfresne west of Kerguelen Island, Southern Ocean. The transfer function used to reconstruct summer (Janunary to March) SST is the Modern Analog Technique that here uses 249 surface sediment samples (modern analogs), the relative abundances of 32 diatom species and the chord distance to select the five most similar modern analogs (Crosta et al., 2020). This method yields a root mean square error of prediction of ~1 °C. The core chronology is detailed in Thöle et al. (2019).