Orbit & astronomical theory of ice ages
Insolation calculation
Paleoclimatic reconstructions help to discover the natural variability of the climate system over times scales ranging from years to hundreds of thousands of years. They are fundamental in climate research, especially now, because they provide a unique set of data to validate models over climatic situations largely different from those of the last 150 years. The climatic situations of the last century are indeed available in great detail, but with a very poor diversity. Among the different modes of climatic variations, the glacial‐interglacial cycles have the advantage that they provide examples of extreme climates and that their primary astronomical cause is now pretty well known. The Astronomical Theory of paleoclimates aims indeed to explain these climatic variations occurring with quasi‐periodicities situated between tens and hundreds of thousands of years. Such variations are recorded in deep‐sea sediments, in ice sheets and in continental archives. The origin of these quasi‐cycles lies in the astronomically driven changes of the latitudinal and seasonal distribution of the energy that the Earth receives from the Sun. Milutin Milankovitch extensively published about this theory between 1920 and 1950, but the relationship between the astronomical parameters, insolation and climate, had already been suggested at the beginning of the nineteenth century. There were several authors who have contributed to what is now named (often improperly) the Milankovitch astronomical theory.
☞ Orbital data source http://eisenman.ucsd.edu/code/daily_insolation.m
☞ Download or show Jupyter Notebook (.ipynb)
☞ Download orbital data (.csv)