Keith Briffa
Climatic Research Unit : Staff

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Professor Keith Briffa


Keith Briffa's full publication list


Keith Briffa was a Professor at the Climatic Research Unit, University of East Anglia, Norwich, U.K., where he worked since 1977. He was born in 1952 and died in 2017. His primary research interests were in late Holocene climate change with a geographical emphasis on northern Eurasia. His specialism was dendroclimatology (see e.g. Chapter 10 of Bradley Paleoclimatology: Reconstructing Climates of the Quaternary) a field in which he produced a number of widely cited reconstructions of past climate variability (in western North America, northern North America, Western Europe, Fennoscandia and western Siberia). He coordinated ADVANCE-10K a European Community funded project (involving 15 institutions in 9 countries) using various forms of tree-ring data (ring widths, ring densities and carbon and oxygen isotopes) to reconstruct high-resolution northern European climate change over the last 10,000 years. Briffa engaged in collaborative tree-ring projects with colleagues in N. America, Russia, S. America (Chile and Argentina), New Zealand and China.

Besides tree-ring research, Briffa's interests encompassed evidence of recent climate change based on instrumental records, and the theory and general application of various palaeoclimate data for describing 'natural' climate variability, its relationships with possible forcing factors and the relevance for anthropogenic climate change detection. Briffa was an Associate Editor of the journals The Holocene (of which he was a founding member) and Dendrochronologia.

For full details of Briffa's scientific contributions, look at his full list of publications. Data and materials associated with his work are available at the International Tree-Ring Data Bank (ITRDB), via the CRU website and listed below.


Last updated: May 2018