Millennial temperature reconstruction based on tree-ring widths of Qilian juniper from Wulan, Qinghai Province, China

The climate of the past 1000 years is an important context for evaluating the recent climate warming. However, there are few 1000-year-long climate reconstructions with annual resolution in the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau. In this paper, a dendroclimatic analysis was conducted for the radial growth of Qilian juniper from the upper forest limit in Wulan, Qinghai Province. The results of correlation analysis between the tree-ring widths and the climate variables indicate that the growth of junipers at the upper forest limit is mainly limited by low temperatures of September, November and February of the pregrowth season, and July of the current growth season. There is no significant correlation between the tree-ring widths and precipitation. A mean temperature from the previous year’s September to the current year’s April was reconstructed for the Wulan area since A.D. 1000. The reconstruction can explain 40.8% of the instrumental variance in the calibration period (1856–2002). The reconstruction shows that the 20th century is the warmest 100 years, and the 1990s is the warmest decade during the past 1000 years, while the coldest 100 years and decade occur at 1600–1699 and 1642–1651, respectively. The variations are verified well by the temperature reconstruction of the middle Qilian Mountain (QL) and the total organic carbon (TOC) in the Qinghai Lake sediments. The comparison of our reconstruction with the annual temperature reconstruction of extra-tropical Northern Hemisphere suggests that the climate of Wulan during the Medieval Warm Period is of obvious regional specialty, but there was a good response to the climate of hemispheric scales during the recent 400 years. Supported by National Basic Research Program of China (Grant No. 2005 CB422002), National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 40671194 and 40371118), and the Knowledge Innovation Program of Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research (Grant No. CXIOG-A05-12)