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Millennium annual mean temperature variations on the Tibetan Plateau and their relationships with Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation
Paper ID : 1048-ADA2013
Authors:
Bao Yang *1, Jianglin Wang2
1320 Donggang West Road, Lanzhou, 730000, Gansu, China
2Cold and Arid Regions Environmental and Engineering Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences
Abstract:
The Tibetan Plateau (TP) is a climatically important region, due to its influences on large-scale atmospheric circulations over Asia and the Northern Hemisphere. However, lack of long meteorological records limits our understanding of climate variability on decadal to centennial timescales. Thus we have to resort to large numbers of high-resolution proxy climate records to disentangle climatic variability in a long-term perspective. It is well known tree-ring records have high temporal (from seasonal to annual) resolution and reliability (well repeatability), and thus provide important information on long-term climate fluctuations. Therefore, we developed new millennium-long ring-width chronologies for the Tibetan Plateau by applying standard dendrochronological (STD) methodologies on a set of ring-width series of junipers. An annual mean temperature reconstruction covering the last millennium is presented for the TP. Investigation of the spatial and temporal variations in annual mean temperature revealed coherent fluctuations in annual mean temperatures across the TP during the last 50 years. Spatial correlation patterns indicate that our temperature reconstructions are reasonable proxies of temperature change on the whole TP during the past decades. Comparisons of our reconstructions with other temperature records from the TP indicated that although there were some discrepancies between them, in general, similar patterns of warm-cold variations suggested that interannual to multidecadal temperature variations were generally synchronous across the TP during the past millennium. The periods 1050–1300 and 1600–1800 are common long-term warm and cold intervals which correspond to the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) and the Little Ice Age (LIA), respectively. On interannual to multidecadal time scales, temperature variations on the TP are closely associated with the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO), which also contributed to the mismatch between the NH and TP temperature patterns during the past decades.
Keywords:
Temperature reconstruction; tree-ring width; last millennium; AMO; Tibetan Plateau
Status : Abstract Accepted