Autumn–winter minimum temperature changes in the southern Sikhote-Alin mountain range of northeastern Asia since 1529 AD

Abstract

Abstract. The aim of our research was to reconstruct climatic parameters (for the first time for the Sikhote-Alin mountain range) and to compare them with global climate fluctuations. As a result, we have found that one of the most important limiting factors for the study area is the minimum temperatures of the previous autumnwinter season (August-December), and this finding perfectly conforms to that in other territories. We reconstructed the previous August-December minimum temperature for 485 years, from 1529 to 2014. We found 12 cold periods (1535-1540, 1550-1555, 1643-1649, 1659-1667, 1675-1689, 1722-1735, 1791-1803, 1807-1818, 1822-1827, 1836-1852, 1868-1887, 1911-1925) and seven warm periods (1560-1585, 1600-1610, 1614-1618, 1738-1743, 1756-1759, 1776-1781, 1944-2014). These periods correlate well with reconstructed data for the Northern Hemisphere and the neighboring territories of China and Japan. Our reconstruction has 3-, 9-, 20-, and 200-year periods, which may be in line with high-frequency fluctuations in El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), the short-term solar cycle, Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) fluctuations, and the 200-year solar activity cycle, respectively. We suppose that the temperature of the North Pacific, expressed by the PDO may make a major contribution to regional climate variations. We also assume that the regional climatic response to solar activity becomes apparent in the temperature changes in the northern part of Pacific Ocean and corresponds to cold periods during the solar minimum. These comparisons show that our climatic reconstruction based on tree ring chronology for this area may potentially provide a proxy record for long-term, large-scale past temperature patterns for northeastern Asia. The reconstruction reflects the global traits and local variations in the climatic processes of the southern territory of the Russian Far East for more than the past 450 years.

Tree-ring-based spring precipitation reconstruction in the Sikhote-Alin' Mountain range

“…All tree-ring chronologies presented in this paper are available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4721910 (Ukhvatkina et al, 2021 Review statement. This paper was edited by Chantal Camenisch and reviewed by Matthew Therrell and three anonymous referees.…”

Tree-ring based spring precipitation reconstruction in the Sikhote-Alin Mountain Range

“…Growth-climate analysis identified the effect of temperature for different seasons at individual sites. Extreme temperatures are widely known to have a severe limiting impact on the growth of trees located at the boundary of their growth region (northern boundary of the distribution area and altitudinal forest limit) (Wison and Luckman, 2002;Körner and Paulsen, 2004;Porter et al, 2013;Yin et al, 2015;Ukhvatkina et al, 2018). At points where the ocean (monsoon) influence is stronger, the average temperatures of the early spring -February-April for the SSA and March-April for the CSA -become significant for plant growth.…”

“…There are only few available studies, for example, e.g. from the Sakhalin Island (Wiles et al, 2014), the Kuril Islands (Jacoby et al, 2004), and the Primorsky Region (Ukhvatkina et al, 2018) and they purely focused on temperature reconstruction.…”

“…As the analysis of modern global meteorological trends clearly shows recently, the Far Eastern region is characterized by increasing variability in temperature and precipitation, which leads to a higher frequency of extreme hydrological events (Gartsman, 2008;Dobrovolsky, 2011;Khon and Mokhov, 2012;Dai et al, 2009;Huntington, 2008;Liu et al, 2003a;Milly et al, 2002;Ukhvatkina et al, 2018;Altman et al, 2018). Therefore, the issues of hydrological regime changes are of great importance for humankind and nature (Shamov et al, 2014).…”