What does high/low-resolution (proxy data) mean?

Question

I sometimes see:

low frequency temperature variance,

high/low frequency proxy data

or,

high/low resolution proxy data

what do they mean? Frequency and Resolution, do they mean the same thing?

thank you!

Answer 1

frequency is referring to how often something occurs....it could be something like the ice age cycles that are ever 10-21 thousand years or something like the seasonal cycles that aree about 4-5 months.  THe frequency is how often they occur.  It is expressed as occurance over time (occurence/time).  4 seasons/year or 6 ice ages/1000 years.

Resolution is dealing with the accuracy of said measurements....high resolution proxy data would mean that they have a lot of data trying to measure the same thing.  Like say scientists are trying to pinpoint the temperature from 10,000 years ago.  If you have 5 measurements averaging to 5 degrees then it wont be that accurate because your numbers can be anywhere....but if you have 500 measurements averaging to 5 degrees then your resolution is much higher which makes you closer to the true value....It has to do with how much data is collected which in turn affects the accuracy of the measurement.  Low resolution is less accurate and high resolution is more accurate