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A 7400-year tree-ring chronology in northern Swedish Lapland: natural climatic variability expressed on annual to millennial timescales

Climate Impacts Research Centre, Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, S-981 07 Abisko, Sweden; Department of Physical Geography and Quaternary Geology, Stockholm University, S-106 91 Stockholm, Sweden grudd{at}natgeo.su.se

Keith R. Briffa

Climatic Research Unit, University of East Anglia, Norwich NR4 7TJ, UK

Wibjorn Karlén

Department of Physical Geography and Quaternary Geology, Stockholm University, S-106 91 Stockholm, Sweden

Thomas S. Bartholin

Department of Quaternary Geology, Lund University, Tornav. 13, S-223 63 Lund, Sweden; Natural Science Research Institute, National Museum of Denmark, NY Vestergade II, DK-1471 Copenhagen, Denmark

Philip D. Jones

Climatic Research Unit, University of East Anglia, Norwich NR4 7TJ, UK

Bernd Kromer

Heidelberg Academy of Sciences, Inst. f. Umweltphysik, INF 366, D-69120 Heidelberg, Germany

Tree-ring widths from 880 living, dry dead, and subfossil northern Swedish pines (Pinus syl vestris L.) have been assembled into a continuous and precisely dated chronology (the Torneträsk chronology) covering the period 5407 BC to ad 1997. Biological trends in the data were removed with autoregressive standardization (ARS) to emphasize year-to-year variability, and with regional curve stan dardization (RCS) to emphasize variability on timescales from decades to centuries. The strong association with summer mean temperature (June–August) has enabled the production of a temperature reconstruction for the last 7400 years, providing information on natural summer-temperature variability on timescales from years to centuries. Numerous cold episodes, comparable in severity and duration to the severe summers of the seventeenth century, are shown throughout the last seven millennia. Particularly severe conditions suggested between 600 and 1 BC correspond to a known period of glacier expansion. The relatively warm conditions of the late twentieth century do not exceed those reconstructed for several earlier time intervals, although replication is relatively poor and confidence in the reconstructions is correspondingly reduced in the pre-Christian period, particularly around 3000, 1600 and 330 bc. Despite the use of the RCS approach in chronology construction, the 7400-year chronology does not express the full range of millennial-timescale temperature change in northern Sweden.

Key Words: Dendroclimatology • tree rings • climate • summer temperature • Pinus sylvestris • northern Scandinavia • Holocene

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