***Update (12/18/2011): Our sessions have been scheduled for the following times:

Thursday, December 8th:   

Friday, December 9th:        

The timeline for the 2011 AGU Fall Meeting is on an accelerated schedule this year and it is hard to believe that the abstract submission period is already open (the final submission deadline is August 4th, 2011).  There are going to be lots of very interesting sessions on topics relevant to research on the climate of the Common Era (for instance, see: PP07, PP09, GC04, and GC45).  These will be joined by session PP28, convened by me and my colleagues (Kevin Anchukaitis, Julien Emile-Geay and Ed Cook) and titled The Climate of the Common Era (see the abstract below).  This is the second year that we have convened this session and we are looking forward to building off the success of the first year, for which there was a high level of participation at two oral sessions and one poster session.  Once again we look forward to a broad interdisciplinary set of papers spanning subjects on proxy interpretation and development, millennial GCM simulations, and reconstruction methods and statistics.  If you work in these areas and plan to attend the meeting, we hope that you will consider participating either through an abstract submission or by attending the sessions in San Francisco.  You of course can also contact any of the conveners if you have questions about our plans or focus.

PP28: The Climate of the Common Era

Abstract: Our understanding of climate system dynamics at interannual to millennial timescales over the Common Era continues to advance as new techniques and improved technologies expand and refine the process of proxy data collection, assimilation, and analysis. Robust paleoclimatic reconstructions are necessary for objective analysis and assessment of observations during the 20th century. We invite papers on all aspects of the climate of the last two thousand years, including paleoclimate reconstructions, statistical methods, and climate system modeling. We particularly welcome studies that assimilate proxy records into spatiotemporal estimates of past climate variability and paleoclimate dynamics or those that assess the theoretical limits of such approaches.