Maximum growing season temperature in Western Europe: multi proxy reconstructions in Fontainebleau from 1596 to 2000

Abstract

Abstract. In this study, we have combined a Burgundy grape harvest date record with new δ18O measurements conducted on timbers and living trees cellulose from Fontainebleau castle and forest. Our reconstruction is expected to provide a reference series for the variability of growing season temperature (from April to September) in Western Europe from 1596 to 2000. We have estimated an uncertainty of 0.55°C on individual growing season maximum temperature reconstructions. We are able to assess this uncertainty, which is not the case for many documentary sources (diaries etc.), and even not the case for early instrumental temperature data. We compare our data with a number of independent temperature estimates for Europe and the Northern Hemisphere. The comparison between our reconstruction and Manley mean growing season temperature data provides an independent control of the quality of CET data. We show that our reconstruction preserves more variance back in time, because it was not distorted/averaged by statistical/homogenisation methods. Further works will be conducted to compare the δ18O data from wood cellulose provided by transects of different tree species in Europe obtained within the EC ISONET project and the French ANR Program ESCARSEL, to analyse the spatial and temporal coherency between δ18O records. The decadal variability will be also compared with other precipitation δ18O records such as those obtained from benthic ostracods from deep peri-Alpine lakes or simulated by regional atmospheric models equipped with the modelling of water stable isotopes.

A method to separate temperature and precipitation signals encoded in tree-ring widths for the western Tien Shan Mountains, northwest China

“…This is at least partially due to the fact that the precipitation signals of the tree-ring chronologies have been eliminated in our temperature reconstruction. In addition, most of these early reconstructions focused on studying the seasonal maximum temperatures (Chen et al, 2009;Fan et al, 2008;Pan et al, 2007;Shang et al, 2011), which also showed more high-frequency variability in many other studies over the world (e.g., Arsalani et al, 2015;Etien et al, 2007;Gou et al, 2008;Shi et al, 2010;Wilson and Luckman, 2003). Moreover, some reconstructions were developed using the residual (RES) chronologies (Chen et al, 2009;Pan et al, 2007), which lack low-frequency variability.…”