Annual precipitation variation for the southern edge of the Gobi Desert (China) inferred from tree rings: linkages to climatic warming of twentieth century

Feng Chen (), Yujiang Yuan, Tongwen Zhang and Hans Linderholm

Natural Hazards: Journal of the International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards, 2016, vol. 81, issue 2, 939-955

Abstract: We developed a new reconstruction of annual precipitation (August–July) for the Helan Mountains near the southern edge of the Gobi Desert, using a regional tree-ring width chronology. The reconstruction explained 52.1 % of the observed precipitation variance during the period 1953–2008. In addition to the new precipitation reconstruction for the Helan Mountains, two previously published annual precipitation reconstructions from the same region were also used to infer the large-scale precipitation signal of the southern edge of the Gobi Desert. Spatial correlation analyses with gridded precipitation data showed that the tree-ring records were indeed able to capture much of the regional interannual precipitation variability. Using principal component analyses on the precipitation reconstructions and documentary records, 29 large-scale dry events were found during the period AD 1760–2006. Many of these dry events have had profound impacts on the people of the study area over the past several centuries. A notably good agreement with a temperature reconstruction for Zhangye suggests that the precipitation of the Gobi Desert has the characteristics of monsoon rainfall variability (wet–warm and cold–dry). Our precipitation reconstruction exhibited a downward trend during the last two decades, a trend also found in northern and eastern China. It might be caused by a weakening of the Asian summer monsoon induced by global warming (especially increased sea surface temperature). Copyright Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2016

Keywords: Dendrochronology; Annual precipitation reconstruction; Gobi Desert; Global warming (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s11069-015-2113-z (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:nathaz:v:81:y:2016:i:2:p:939-955

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/11069

DOI: 10.1007/s11069-015-2113-z

Access Statistics for this article

Natural Hazards: Journal of the International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards is currently edited by Thomas Glade, Tad S. Murty and Vladimír Schenk

More articles in Natural Hazards: Journal of the International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards from Springer, International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().