Temperature reconstruction based on 361 year old dendrochronology of Platycladus orientalis (L.) franco in the Wula Mountains, China.

The northern edge of the East Asian monsoon region is also a transition zone of temperate continental and monsoon climate, which is a sensitive zone of global climate and ecological environment change. It is an urgent problem to find out the long-term climate change rules of this region. Using 101 tree core samples obtained from 54 trees, a 343-year tree-ring width chronology of the Platycladus orientalis (L.) Franco (1673–2016) in the Wula Mountains, Inner Mongolia, China was established. The analysis shows that the radial growth of P. orientalis is closely related to hydrothermal conditions, the average minimum temperature and relative humidity are the main factors that determine the growth of P. orientalis. Based on the strong correlation between the tree-ring indices and the annual average minimum temperature (r = −0.870, p < 0.001), we reconstructed an average annual minimum temperature series from 1673 to 2016 using a linear regression equation, and the reconstructed equation can explain 75.724% of the variance, respectively. According to the data from the past 343 years, the changes in the annual average minimum temperature series had the cycles of 58.6-, 7.7-, 3.4-, 3.1-, 2.2-, and 2.1-years; the series showed three warm periods (1824–1830, 1909–1922, and 1986–2011) and 4 cold periods (1703–1712, 1731–1738, 1754–1763, and 1937–1951). The low temperature periods recorded in the reconstructed series for the 17th and 18th centuries are consistent with the Little Ice Age that occurred in the northern hemisphere, and the heating rate significantly increased at the end of the 20th century. In addition, the cold and warm periods recorded by the reconstruction result is basically consistent with the extreme climate events recorded in the historical documents of the region and the reconstruction results in other regions. In this paper, the world's first chronology of P. orientalis tree ring width was established. A historical sequence of annual average minimum temperature of 343 years was reconstructed in a typical region of the East Asian monsoon climate. It fills in the blank of reconstruction sequence and variation characteristics of mean minimum temperature in the northern edge of East Asian monsoon and transition zone of temperate continental and monsoon climate in recent four centuries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]