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4 Tree Rings
Pages 45-52

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From page 45...
... · Surface temperature reconstructions based on tree rings require atten tion to confounding factors; guidelines exist to identify and account for these factors. DEFINITION AND PREMISES Dendroclimatology is the application of tree ring science, or dendrochronology, to the study of climate (Fritts 1976)
From page 46...
... . An intriguing hypothesis for the ability of treeline pine species to record slowly changing surface temperatures involves the fact that needles formed in one growing season remain alive and functioning for 10­30 years (LaMarche 1974)
From page 47...
... . After crossdating, tree ring parameters other than width (such as density, stable isotopic composition, cell size and wall thickness, resin duct density, and trace metal concentrations)
From page 48...
... , which assumes that modern natural processes have acted similarly in the past, and is also discussed as the "stationarity" assumption in Chapter 9. Although limiting factors controlled tree ring parameters in the past just as they do today, it is possible that the role of different factors at a single location or over an entire region could change over time.
From page 49...
... . In Siberia, on the other hand, reduced correlation of tree ring chronologies with summer temperature has been attributed to increasing winter precipitation, which leads to delayed snowmelt in permafrost environments, thus shortening the tree growing season (Vaganov et al.
From page 51...
... On the other hand, no convincing evidence for such effect was found in conifer tree ring records from the Sierra Nevada in California (Graumlich 1991) or the Rocky Mountains in Colorado (Kienast and FIGURE 4-2 Results for individual regional composite chronologies for the sites shown in Figure 4-1.
From page 52...
... Promising areas of current and future research can be summarized as: · updating site chronologies that were collected 20­30 years ago, · increasing the number and geographic coverage of temperature-sensitive tree ring chronologies longer than 1,000 years, · quantifying the precision and accuracy of low-frequency temperature signals, · performing experimental studies on biophysical relationships between temperature and tree ring parameters, and · refining mechanistic models of temperature effects on tree ring parameters at multiple spatial and temporal scales.


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