Ola Kwiecien, Tobias Braun, Camilla Francesca Brunello, Patrick Faulkner, Niklas

Hausmann, Gerd Helle, Julie A. Hoggarth, Monica Ionita, Christopher S. Jazwa, Saige
Kelmelis, Norbert Marwan, Cinthya Nava-Fernandez, Carole Nehme, Thomas Opel,
Jessica L. Oster, Aurel Perşoiu, Cameron Petrie, Keith Prufer, Saija M. Saarni,
Annabel Wolf, Sebastian F.M. Breitenbach,
What we talk about when we talk about seasonality – A transdisciplinary review,
Earth-Science Reviews,
Volume 225,
2022,
103843,
ISSN 0012-8252,
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.earscirev.2021.103843.
(https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0012825221003445)
Abstract: The role of seasonality is indisputable in climate and ecosystem
dynamics. Seasonal temperature and precipitation variability are of vital
importance for the availability of food, water, shelter, migration routes, and raw
materials. Thus, understanding past climatic and environmental changes at seasonal
scale is equally important for unearthing the history and for predicting the future
of human societies under global warming scenarios. Alas, in palaeoenvironmental
research, the term ‘seasonality change’ is often used liberally without scrutiny or
explanation as to which seasonal parameter has changed and how. Here we provide
fundamentals of climate seasonality and break it down into external (insolation
changes) and internal (atmospheric CO2 concentration) forcing, and regional and
local and modulating factors (continentality, altitude, large-scale atmospheric
circulation patterns). Further, we present a brief overview of the archives with
potentially annual/seasonal resolution (historical and instrumental records, marine
invertebrate growth increments, stalagmites, tree rings, lake sediments,
permafrost, cave ice, and ice cores) and discuss archive-specific challenges and
opportunities, and how these limit or foster the use of specific archives in
archaeological research. Next, we address the need for adequate data-quality
checks, involving both archive-specific nature (e.g., limited sampling resolution
or seasonal sampling bias) and analytical uncertainties. To this end, we present a
broad spectrum of carefully selected statistical methods which can be applied to
analyze annually- and seasonally-resolved time series. We close the manuscript by
proposing a framework for transparent communication of seasonality-related research
across different communities.
Keywords: Seasonality; Speleothems; Varves; Invertebrates; Tree rings; Statistics;
Archaeology; Historical climatology; Cave ice; Permafrost