The influence of decision-making in tree ring-based climate reconstructions
Abstract
Tree-ring chronologies underpin the majority of annually-resolved reconstructions of Common Era climate. However, they are derived using different datasets and techniques, the ramifications of which have hitherto been little explored. Here, we report the results of a double-blind experiment that yielded 15 Northern Hemisphere summer temperature reconstructions from a common network of regional tree-ring width datasets. Taken together as an ensemble, the Common Era reconstruction mean correlates with instrumental temperatures from 1794–2016 CE at 0.79 (p <0.001), reveals summer cooling in the years following large volcanic eruptions, and exhibits strong warming since the 1980s. Differing in their mean, variance, amplitude, sensitivity, and persistence, the ensemble members demonstrate the influence of subjectivity in the reconstruction process. We therefore recommend the routine use of ensemble reconstruction approaches to provide a more consensual picture of past climate variability.
Citation
Büntgen , U , Allen , K , Anchukaitis , K J , Arseneault , D , Boucher , É , Bräuning , A , Chatterjee , S , Cherubini , P , Churakova (Sidorova) , O V , Corona , C , Gennaretti , F , Grießinger , J , Guillet , S , Guiot , J , Gunnarson , B , Helama , S , Hochreuther , P , Hughes , M K , Huybers , P , Kirdyanov , A V , Krusic , P J , Ludescher , J , Meier , W J-H , Myglan , V S , Nicolussi , K , Oppenheimer , C , Reinig , F , Salzer , M W , Seftigen , K , Stine , A R , Stoffel , M , St. George , S , Tejedor , E , Trevino , A , Trouet , V , Wang , J , Wilson , R , Yang , B , Xu , G & Esper , J 2021 , ' The influence of decision-making in tree ring-based climate reconstructions ' , Nature Communications , vol. 12 , 3411 . https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-23627-6
Publication
Nature Communications
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
2041-1723Type
Journal article
Rights
This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.
Description
U.B. and J.E. received funding from SustES: Adaptation strategies for sustainable ecosystem services and food security under adverse environmental conditions (CZ.02.1.01/0.0/0.0/16_019/0000797), and the ERC project MONOSTAR (AdG 882727). C.C., S.G. and M.S. received funding from the SNF Sinergia project CALDERA (project no. 183571). S.C. acknowledges support from US National Science Foundation grants 1737918, 1939916 and 1939956.Collections
Items in the St Andrews Research Repository are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.