The REPLICATE project: Multi-parameter reconstruction of Carpathian temperatures from tree rings

Abstract

Understanding past climate variability is of major importance due to the current scenario of global change and the resulting societal, economic, and political impacts (IPCC, 2014). Since instrumental climatic records rarely extend more than a couple of centuries into the past, natural proxy archives allow longer-term paleoclimatic information to be obtained, and tree rings can provide such insight into past climate over centennial to millennial timescales. The reconstruction of past climatic conditions helps constrain model estimates of possible future climate scenarios. While large-scale hemispheric reconstructions of climatic variability have received considerable attention, the importance of moving the focus towards the development of finer-scale, denser networks of regional reconstructions have been highlighted (Pages 2k Consortium, 2013). In this sense, to achieve a more accurate understanding of past local and regional-scale climate variability, it is necessary to improve the spatial resolution of reconstructions. With this approach, validation among reconstructions becomes possible and reduces reliance on a small number of records.