Title: improve climate reconstructions from tree rings
Post by lee on Apr 15th, 2020 at 3:59pm
Quote:Tree rings tell us a lot about what the climate was like in the past and are therefore used by researchers for climate reconstructions - something that is particularly relevant in a time of climate change. However, since the 1960s, the rings of trees have no longer provided an accurate reflection of temperature development. This problem, known as divergence, is the starting point for a new research project, for which paleoclimatologist Professor Jan Esper of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) will be receiving more than EUR 2.5 million in EU funding. Over the project's five-year duration, Esper and his team will track the development of trees at 100 sites in the Northern Hemisphere to develop a new model for the reconstruction of tree growth that will generate reliable data for climate research. The European Research Council (ERC) has awarded Professor Jan Esper and his MONOSTAR project an ERC Advanced Grant, the EU's most richly endowed funding award that is earmarked for outstanding researchers.
Tree rings present a prime archive in which hundreds of years' worth of climatic developments have been recorded in great detail, from regional to global scales. However, climate reconstructions depend on reliable correlations between tree growth and climate. "It worked very well up until the second half of the last century," explained Esper. "But since the 1960s, the tree ring width and densities have not been able to keep pace with global warming." It was during the 1990s that the divergence problem was recognized as a phenomenon with far-reaching consequences. Not only does it undermine the reliability of temperature reconstructions based on tree rings, it also has implications for our understanding of how sensitive the Earth's climate is to man-made greenhouse gases. "The problem impacts all climate reconstructions based on year-to-year changes over the past 1,000 to 2,000 years," Esper pointed out. |
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https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-04/jgum-jer041420.phpTreemometers stopped working after the 1960's. "You've seen one tree you've seen Yamal."
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