Dr. Inga Labuhn

My research aims at reconstructing the climate of the past. The characterization of natural climate variability can help us to understand how climate responds to natural forcings, as well as to identify the human influence on climate. I am working with stable isotopes and other proxies from different continental climate archives, including tree rings, lake sediments, and speleothems. My goal is to produce well-dated, high resolution climate records for the Holocene on seasonal to millennial timescales, with a regional focus on Western and Northern Europe.
I am particularly interested in two aspects which are important for improving climate reconstructions. First, to develop ‘calibrations’ by establishing statistical relationships and by investigating the processes during archive formation that link the proxies to climatic influences. Second, a ‘multi-archive approach’ that combines different archives and proxies to detect common signals and reduce uncertainties.
Another one of my key interests is the impact climate and environmental changes have on humans. In collaboration with historians, I am working on compilations and analyses of available palaeoclimate data to study how climate variability and abrupt events may have affected societies from Antiquity to Medieval times.

See my list of publications on Google Scholar