Synthesis often involves integrating archaeological and environmental data. SKOPE (Synthesizing Knowledge of Past Environments) is a free web application that provides easy access to tree-ring based annual retrodictions of precipitation and temperature at 800m spatial resolution for the Southwest US for the last 2000 years (data values provided by PaleoCAR, which is calibrated to PRISM). At a coarser spatial resolution (~50km), SKOPE offers annual reconstructions of the Palmer Modified Drought Index (PMDI; the successor to the Palmer Drought Severity Index or PDSI) for the contiguous 48 US states, also for the last 2000 years.  SKOPE offers animated maps and time-series graphical summaries of these environmental variable values for arbitrarily bounded study areas.
Please click these links to see a more detailed announcement, to try the SKOPE App, or to view the SKOPE User’s Guide.
The SKOPE platform is quite flexible and able to manage very large datasets. At this time, SKOPE only offers modeled data for the US. However, as time and funding allow, we expect to add additional paleoenvironmental datasets for the US and other areas of the world.
The SKOPE Team: R. Kyle Bocinsky, Andrew Gillreath-Brown, Keith Kintigh, Ann Kinzig, Timothy A. Kohler, Allen Lee, Bertram Ludaescher, and Timothy McPhillips.
This material is based upon work supported by the US National Science Foundation under Grant Nos. SMA 1439591 and 1637189 to Arizona State University, SMA 1439603 and 1637155 to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and SMA 1439516 and 1637171 to Washington State University.