Lack of cool, not warm, extremes distinguishes late 20th Century climate in 979-year Tasmanian summer temperature reconstruction

KJ Allen; ER Cook; R Evans; R Francey; BM Buckley; JG Palmer; MJ Peterson; PJ Baker

Journal article

Lack of cool, not warm, extremes distinguishes late 20th Century climate in 979-year Tasmanian summer temperature reconstruction

KJ Allen, ER Cook, R Evans, R Francey, BM Buckley, JG Palmer, MJ Peterson, PJ Baker

Environmental Research Letters | IOP PUBLISHING LTD | Published : 2018

DOI: 10.1088/1748-9326/aaafd7

Abstract

Very few annually resolved millennial-length temperature reconstructions exist for the Southern Hemisphere. Here we present four 979-year reconstructions for southeastern Australia for the austral summer months of December-February. Two of the reconstructions are based on the Australian Water Availability Project dataset and two on the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature dataset. For each climate data set, one reconstruction is based solely on Lagarostrobos franklinii (restricted reconstructions) while the other is based on multiple Tasmanian conifer species (unrestricted reconstructions). Each reconstruction calibrates ∼50-60% of the variance in the temperature datasets depending on the numb..

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University of Melbourne Researchers

Patrick Baker Author

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Grants

Awarded by European Research Council

Funding Acknowledgements

We thank Scott Nichols for technical assistance in developing the chronologies, Greg Lee for computing assistance, and Carly Tozer, James Risbey, Didier Monselesan, Michael Grose and Ben Cook for useful discussions about this work. We thank Parks Tasmania, ForestryTas and Hydro Tasmania for permission to access sites. The work was supported by Australian Research Council grants DP1201040320 and DP15010325 to PJB and ERC and FT120100715 to PJB. It is Lamont-Doherty contribution no. 8195. We also thank two reviewers for their constructive comments that have helped improve this work. Reconstructions presented in this article are available from the corresponding author.