North Pacific Regional Study (APARE) of the IGAC Program, which includes scientists from China, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and the United States. PEM-West scientists measured a suite of important trace gases and aerosols from two aircraft (a NASA DC-8 and a short-range Japanese aircraft)³ and six intensive ground stations over the western Pacific Ocean. SMA, in collaboration with NOAA, operates one such intensive station on the eastern coast of China.

The objective of the IGBP Past Global Changes (PAGES) Core Project⁴ is to organize efforts internationally to better understand past changes in the earth system in order to put current and future global changes into perspective and to improve the interpretation of their causes and dynamics. PAGES has taken a ''two-stream'' approach. The first stream is directed to relatively recent earth history of the last 2,000 years. The second stream takes a longer view of the glacial-interglacial cycles of the Late Quaternary Period (IGBP 1990).

Research on historical analysis of environmental change is voluminous in China; virtually every aspect of PAGES research described in IGBP Report No. 12 (1990) or in Bradley (1991) is being reported. Every CAS institute involved in global change research lists some form of historical analysis (CAS 1991), and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) has funded this area extensively (Appendix B). In fact, the literature is so enormous that it would require a separate and extensive inquiry to catalogue and review materials cited by the Chinese. With few exceptions, work identified by the panel was restricted to China and connections with the rest of the earth system such as telecommunications with global climate anomalies remain to be made.

The fundamental objectives of this work have been summarized by the CNCIGBP (Ma 1991):

1. Reconstruction of past climate change and environmental variation, especially covering the last 2,000 years, through the enormous Chinese historical writings on climate and environmental descriptions, especially in eastern China.

2. Development of multiproxy data from tree-ring chronologies, archaeological studies, and ice core and sedimentary analyses to supplement written records.