Tree-Ring Width Data of Tsuga longibracteata Reveal Growing Season Temperature Signals in the North-Central Pearl River Basin since 1824 AD

Abstract

Concerning the ecological and economical importance of the Pearl River basin, short-term climate changes have been widely studied by using the instrumental records in the basin, but there is still a lack of long-term climatic reconstructions that can be used to evaluate the centennial scale climate anomalies. Here, we present a 237-year tree-ring width chronology from Tsuga longibracteata in the north-central Pearl River basin, with reliable coverage from 1824 to 2016. Based on the significant relationship between tree growth and mean temperature from the previous March to the previous October, we reconstructed the previous growing season (pMar-pOct) temperatures for the past 193 years, with an explained variance of 43.3% during 1958–2016. The reconstruction reveals three major warm (1857–1890, 1964–1976, and 1992–2016) and cold (1824–1856, 1891–1963, and 1977–1991) periods during 1824–2016. Comparison with other temperature sensitive proxy records from nearby regions suggests that our reconstruction is representative of large-scale temperature variations. Significant correlations of tree growth with the sea surface temperatures (SSTs) in the western Pacific Ocean, northern Indian Ocean, and Atlantic Ocean suggest that SST variability in these domains may have strongly influenced the growing season temperature change in the Pearl River basin.