This workshop was sponsored by the European Science Foundation (ESF) Programme on Holocene Climate Variability (HOLIVAR). The workshop was organised by Hans Renssen and Tim Osborn, with support from Keith Briffa, Simon Tett and the HOLIVAR steering committee.

• Workshop programme
• Participants
• Abstracts of presentations
• A workshop summary summary has been published as an electronic supplement to the CLIVAR Exchanges newsletter (No. 26, March 2003).

Contacts. The main organisers of the workshop can be contacted by e-mail:
Hans Renssen: renh@geo.vu.nl
Tim Osborn: t.osborn@uea.ac.uk
Please note that Tim Osborn is out of contact from 23rd May to 9th June, so please contact Hans Renssen during this period!

HOLIVAR objectives. The overall goal of the HOLIVAR programme is to increase the understanding of natural climate variability on different time-scales (annual to centennial) over the last 10,000 years and to establish how this understanding can improve the predictability of climate models.

Workshop objectives. The aim of this workshop is strongly tied to the combined use of climate models and palaeoclimate data in addressing the overall goals of HOLIVAR. The focus will therefore be on (1) how palaeodata are being used for evaluation of model simulations, (2) how model simulations are being used to aid in the interpretation of palaeodata, and (3) what techniques and approaches are being developed that are necessary to account for the different characteristics of the data types.