General Physics Colloquium

Title: How tree rings provide a deeper insight into past climate variability – examples from Fennoscandia and Asia

Speaker: Hans Linderholm 

Professor in Physical Geography

Department of Earth Sciences

University of Gothenburg

Sweden

Abstract:

The annual growth of trees represents a combined record of different environmental forcing factors, one of which is climate. Provided that the trees grow in an environment where they are limited by climate, such as close to the elevational or latitudinal tree line, a firmly dated tree-ring chronology can provide climate information with annual resolution. Tree-ring data is easily sampled with high replication at each site, so it is possible to produce dense networks of tree-ring data, which can yield climate information with high temporal and spatial resolution.

Presently, tree-ring data is perhaps the most favoured proxy to reconstruct and understand late Holocene climate variability. Since the 1980s, this scientific field has grown rapidly, and today there exist a wealth of tree-ring data across most of the extratropical regions of the world. This data has been used to increase our understanding of local to global climates, and the influence of external and internal forcing, during the last centuries to millennia. This presentation will focus on the recent developments at the Gothenburg laboratory for Dendrochronology regarding tree-ring research in Fennoscandia, including spatial reconstructions of drought and temperature for the last millennium, but some results from Asia will also be presented and discussed.

Wine and cheese will be served at 4 PM