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Harvard Forest Symposium Abstract 2015
- Title: Placing the record warmth of 2012 in the Northeast US in a long-term perspective
- Primary Author: Kevin Anchukaitis (Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)
- Additional Authors: Daniel Bishop (Harvard Forest); Jeffrey Donnelly (Brown University); Jessie Pearl (Massachusetts Institute of Technology); Neil Pederson (Harvard Forest)
- Abstract:
The record warmth of 2012 comes at the end of a sharp uptick in warming across the Northeastern US. 2012 ended up as the warmest year in the instrumental record of the past 118 years for 8 of the 10 states in the Northeastern US; the remaining two ranked 3rd and 4th all time. While nighttime and winter warming has been significant in this region, warming during the growing season has generally lagged the pace observed at the global scale. Yet, we do not know whether warmth of 2012 stands and recent warming of the last three decades stands in a long-term perspective. The northeastern US is one of the few mid- to high-latitude regions lacking an annually-resolved centennial length reconstruction of paleotemperature. We are in the process of developing multimillennial reconstructions of temperature from the northeastern United States using living and subfossil Atlantic white cedar (Chamaecyparis thyoides) trees. It is possible to make a temperature reconstruction of this length for two reasons. First, earlier work indicates Atlantic white cedar to be one of the most temperature-sensitive tree species in the region. Red spruce (Picea rubens) is the other, but its signal is complicated by acid rain. Second, Atlantic white cedar has been shown to be well-preserved in wetland environments for centuries (Fig. 1), providing the potential for reconstructing an extra-long record for reconstruction. Preliminary findings indicate that many living Atlantic white cedar forests are 150 years or younger. Results from those data suggest 2012 to be the warmest year over that period. However, recent field excursions are unveiling even older trees and the collection of subfossil material continues. The subfossil material couldallow us to extend this record back 1000-2000 or more years. We have started investigations into the climatic sensitivity of Atlantic white cedar along the eastern seaboard. We are also investigating whether a multi-species approach strengthens the climate signal in New England versus those based solely upon Atlantic white cedar. Once developed, our annually-resolved late Holocene reconstruction will be used to characterize variability in regional temperatures at time scales from interannual to millennial, to evaluate climate model simulations over the last millennium, and identify the signature of internal, remote, and global forcing on the climate of the northeastern United States.
- Research Category: Historical and Retrospective Studies
Regional Studies - Figures: AnchukaitisPedersonNortheastClimateHistoryHFsymposium2015pix.pdf
