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Three centuries of winter temperature change on the southeastern Tibetan Plateau and its relationship with the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation

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Abstract

Long-term, high-resolution proxy records containing cold season temperature signals are scarce on the southeastern Tibetan Plateau (TP), limiting our understanding of regional climate and the potential driving forces. In this study, we present a nearly three centuries long reconstruction of winter (December–February) mean temperature for the central Hengduan Mountains, southeastern TP. The reconstruction is derived from a composite tree-ring width chronology of Pinus yunnanensis Franch from two high elevation sites (>3000 m above sea level). Our reconstruction passes all standard calibration-verification schemes and explains nearly 73 % of the variance of the original instrumental data. However, we were constrained to calibrate our full period (1718–2013) reconstruction of December–February mean temperature on the calibration period from 1959 to 1992 only, due to a decrease in temperature sensitivity of tree-ring index exhibited after 1992. Spatial correlation analysis shows that our reconstruction represents large-scale temperature variations in southwest China and the eastern TP. Our reconstructed December–February mean temperature shows a close association with the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) over the past three centuries, with warm (cold) periods coinciding with the positive (negative) phases of the AMO. This persistent relationship suggests that the AMO may have been a key driver of multidecadal winter temperature variations on the southeastern TP.

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Acknowledgments

The authors thank Yanwu Shi and Lingling Li for their help in the laboratory, Bao Yang, Jianping Duan, Zexin Fan and Zongshan Li for sharing their reconstructed temperature data, Jade d’Alpoim Guedes for improving the language, and three anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments. This research was funded by the Research Grants Council of Hong Kong (No. 27300514), the National Science Foundation of China (No. 41271210), the National Key R&D program of China (No. 2016YFA0600503), the Priority Academic Program Development of Jiangsu Higher Education Institutions, and the Jiangsu Collaborative Innovation Center for Climate Change.

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  1. Ministry of Education Key Laboratory for Coast and Island Development, School of Geographic and Oceanographic Sciences, Nanjing University, Nanjing, 210023, China

    Shiyuan Shi, Jiangfeng Shi & Yesi Zhao

  2. Department of Geography, University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam, Hong Kong, China

    Jinbao Li

  3. State Key Laboratory of Numerical Modeling for Atmospheric Sciences and Geophysical Fluid Dynamics, Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100029, China

    Gang Huang

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  1. Shiyuan Shi
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Shi, S., Li, J., Shi, J. et al. Three centuries of winter temperature change on the southeastern Tibetan Plateau and its relationship with the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation. Clim Dyn 49, 1305–1319 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-016-3381-3

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