Spatial reconstruction of Scottish summer temperatures from tree rings
Abstract
A detailed understanding of past temporal patterns and spatial expression of temperature variations is important to place recent anthropogenic climate change into a longer term context. In order to fill the current gap in our understanding of northwest European temperature variability, point-by-point principal component regression was used to reconstruct a spatial field of 0.5° temperature grids across Scotland. A sequence of reconstructions utilizing several combinations of detrending and disturbance correction procedures, and a selection of tree-ring parameters [including ring width (RW), maximum latewood density (MXD) and blue intensity (BI)] was used in an evaluation of reconstruction skill. The high resolution of the reconstructed field serves also as a diagnostic tool to spatially assess the temperature reconstruction potential of local chronologies. Best reconstruction results, reaching calibration r2 = 65.8% and verification r2 = 63.7% in central Scotland over the 1901–1976 period, were achieved using disturbance-corrected and signal-free detrended RW chronologies merged with BI data after low-pass (high-pass) filtering the RW (BI) chronologies. Calibration and verification r2 > 50% was attained for central, north and east Scotland, >40% in west and northwest, and >30% in southern Scotland with verification of nearly all grids showing some reconstruction skill. However, the full calibration potential of reconstructions outside central Scotland was reduced either due to residual disturbance trends undetected by the disturbance correction procedure or due to other climatic or non-climatic factors which may have adversely affected the strength of the climate signal.
Citation
Rydval , M , Gunnarson , B E , Loader , N J , Cook , E R , Druckenbrod , D L & Wilson , R 2017 , ' Spatial reconstruction of Scottish summer temperatures from tree rings ' , International Journal of Climatology , vol. 37 , no. 3 , pp. 1540-1556 . https://doi.org/10.1002/joc.4796
Publication
International Journal of Climatology
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
1097-0088Type
Journal article
Rights
© 2016 Royal Meteorological Society. This work is made available online in accordance with the publisher’s policies. This is the author created, accepted version manuscript following peer review and may differ slightly from the final published version. The final published version of this work is available at https://dx.doi.org/10.1002/joc.4796
Description
The authors wish to thank The Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland for providing funding for Miloš Rydval’s PhD. The Scottish pine network expansion has been an ongoing task since 2006 and funding must be acknowledged to the following projects: EU project ‘Millennium’ (017008-2), Leverhulme Trust project ‘RELiC: Reconstructing 8000 years of Environmental and Landscape change in the Cairngorms (F/00 268/BG)’ and the NERC project ‘SCOT2K: Reconstructing 2000 years of Scottish climate from tree rings (NE/K003097/1)’. We also thank Rider University for a faculty research fellowship that supported Daniel Druckenbrod, and Paul J. Krusic for compiling and making available a PC version of the point-by-point PCR software. Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory contribution No. 8032.Collections
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