Assessment of climate extremes at the regional scale during the last millennium using an annually resolved stalagmite record

Abstract

In public awareness, extraordinary floods, heat-waves, or drought episodes rank amongst the most tangible indications of a changing climate. Forecasting the magnitude of such extreme events at regional and local scales is a major challenge. Development of reliable small-scale climate models requires testing against past climate records, but these are often incomplete, or cover only partial aspects in a spectrum of environmental parameters, e.g., due to seasonal bias as it is the case for tree-ring records. Here, we study a stalagmite from the “Kleine Teufelshöhle” (KTH) in the Franconian karst (Germany) to obtain independent information on local climate conditions at multi-annual to multi-decadal time scales. Radiocarbon and 230Th/U dating provide constraints for linear growth models, which were then successfully refined by correlating high spatial resolution O isotope data for the KTH stalagmite with a published regional tree-ring width record at annual resolution for the past 1000 years. Besides the availability of the tree-ring record, the KTH site offers the additional advantage that direct comparison between tree-ring and speleothem climate proxies with historical documents is possible due to the proximity of the speleothem and tree-ring sites to the former “Free imperial city” of Nuremberg. Historical documents provide precisely dated records of extreme events, in particular for destructive floods. Higher O isotope values in the stalagmite characterize the “Litte Ice Age" (LIA), an interval coinciding with frequent and devastating floods, sometimes associated with river blockage related to accumulation of ice rafts. Prior to approximately 1500 Common Era (CE), O isotope values were generally lower and only show minor overlap with historical flooding accounts. Conversely, some known drought events for Central Europe as well as the climatic influence of large-volume volcanic eruptions with hemispheric to global impact may be recorded in the speleothem as negative excursions in speleothem O isotopic values. The correlated tree-ring and speleothem data for the first time provide a complementary paleohydrology record that is uniquely suited to resolve extreme short-term climate events at the regional scale.