Abstract
This study presents a summer temperature reconstruction using Scots pine tree-ring chronologies for Scotland allowing the placement of current regional temperature changes in a longer-term context. ‘Living-tree’ chronologies were extended using ‘subfossil’ samples extracted from nearshore lake sediments resulting in a composite chronology >800 years in length. The North Cairngorms (NCAIRN) reconstruction was developed from a set of composite blue intensity high-pass and ring-width low-pass filtered chronologies with a range of detrending and disturbance correction procedures. Calibration against July–August mean temperature explains 56.4% of the instrumental data variance over 1866–2009 and is well verified. Spatial correlations reveal strong coherence with temperatures over the British Isles, parts of western Europe, southern Scandinavia and northern parts of the Iberian Peninsula. NCAIRN suggests that the recent summer-time warming in Scotland is likely not unique when compared to multi-decadal warm periods observed in the 1300s, 1500s, and 1730s, although trends before the mid-sixteenth century should be interpreted with some caution due to greater uncertainty. Prominent cold periods were identified from the sixteenth century until the early 1800s—agreeing with the so-called Little Ice Age observed in other tree-ring reconstructions from Europe—with the 1690s identified as the coldest decade in the record. The reconstruction shows a significant cooling response 1 year following volcanic eruptions although this result is sensitive to the datasets used to identify such events. In fact, the extreme cold (and warm) years observed in NCAIRN appear more related to internal forcing of the summer North Atlantic Oscillation.
Highlights
In the past few decades investigations aimed at understanding recent climate change have received considerable attention, focusing on the relationship of these changes to pre-industrial natural climatic variability and on the role and extent of anthropogenic forcing (IPCC 2014)
Despite the existence of a dense network of TR chronologies across Europe, the availability of long TR based temperature reconstructions still remains limited with only a handful of millennial records existing at present
The BI chronology replication and signal strength (Fig. 2b) generally mirror the RW results with the exception of an additional weak period around 1425–1550
Summary
In the past few decades investigations aimed at understanding recent climate change have received considerable attention, focusing on the relationship of these changes to pre-industrial natural climatic variability and on the role and extent of anthropogenic forcing (IPCC 2014). Tree-ring (TR) samples from environments where temperature predominantly limits growth have been used extensively to reconstruct past temperature at various locations around the world (Jones et al 2009). These TR records have played an important role in the reconstruction and understanding of temperature at local and regional scales and long TR chronologies form vital components of annually resolved NH reconstructions of temperature (Wilson et al 2016).
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