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Abstract Paleoclimate reconstructions are now integral to climate assessments, yet the consequences of using different methodologies and proxy data require rigorous benchmarking. Pseudoproxy experiments (PPEs) provide a tractable and transparent test bed for evaluating climate reconstruction methods and their sensitivity to aspects of real-world proxy networks. Here we develop a dataset that leverages proxy system models (PSMs) for this purpose, which emulates the essential physical, chemical, biological, and geological processes that translate climate signals into proxy records, making these synthetic proxies more relevant to the real world. We apply a suite of PSMs to emulate the widely-used PAGES 2k dataset, including realistic spatiotemporal sampling and error structure. A hierarchical approach allows us to produce many variants of this base dataset, isolating the impact of sampling bias in time and space, representation error, sampling error, and other assumptions. Combining these various experiments produces a rich dataset (“pseudoPAGES2k”) for many applications. As an illustration, we show how to conduct a PPE with this dataset based on emerging climate field reconstruction techniques. 

Abstract. Climate field reconstruction (CFR) refers to the estimation of spatiotemporal climate fields (such as surface temperature) from a collection of pointwise paleoclimate proxy datasets. Such reconstructions can provide rich information on climate dynamics and provide an out-of-sample validation of climate models. However, most CFR workflows are complex and time-consuming, as they involve (i) preprocessing of the proxy records, climate model simulations, and instrumental observations; (ii) application of one or more statistical methods; and (iii) analysis and visualization of the reconstruction results. Historically, this process has lacked transparency and accessibility, limiting reproducibility and experimentation by non-specialists. This article presents an open-source and object-oriented Python package called cfr that aims to make CFR workflows easy to understand and conduct, saving climatologists from technical details and facilitating efficient and reproducible research. cfr provides user-friendly utilities for common CFR tasks such as proxy and climate data analysis and visualization, proxy system modeling, and modularized workflows for multiple reconstruction methods, enabling methodological intercomparisons within the same framework. The package is supported with extensive documentation of the application programming interface (API) and a growing number of tutorial notebooks illustrating its usage. As an example, we present two cfr-driven reconstruction experiments using the PAGES 2k temperature database applying the last millennium reanalysis (LMR) paleoclimate data assimilation (PDA) framework and the graphical expectation–maximization (GraphEM) algorithm, respectively.