• Main Authors: Æ Jan, Esper Æ David, C. Frank, Kurt Nicolussi, Æ Martin Schmidhalter
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: 2004
• Subjects: North Atlantic
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.473.4251; http://www.slf.ch/info/mitarbeitende/frank/Buentgen_etal_ClimDyn_2005.pdf

Abstract A June–August Alpine temperature proxy ser-ies is developed back to AD 951 using 1,527 ring-width measurements from living trees and relict wood. The reconstruction is composed of larch data from four Al-pine valleys in Switzerland and pine data from the western Austrian Alps. These regions are situated in high elevation Alpine environments where a spatially homogenous summer temperature signal exists. In an attempt to capture the full frequency range of summer temperatures over the past millennium, from inter-an-nual to multi-centennial scales, the regional curve stan-dardization technique is applied to the ring width measurements. Correlations of 0.65 and 0.86 after dec-adal smoothing, with high elevation meteorological stations since 1864 indicate an optimal response of the RCS chronology to June–August mean temperatures. The proxy record reveals warm conditions from before AD 1000 into the thirteenth century, followed by a pro-longed cool period, reaching minimum values in the 1820s, and a warming trend into the twentieth century. This latter trend and the higher frequency variations compare well with the actual high elevation temperature record. The new central Alpine proxy suggests that summer temperatures during the last decade are unprecedented over the past millennium. It also reveals significant similarities at inter-decadal to multi-centen-nial frequencies with large-scale temperature recon-structions, however, deviating during certain periods from H.H. Lamb‘s European/North Atlantic tempera-ture history.