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Influence of monsoon anomalies on intra-annual density fluctuations of Chinese pine in the Loess Plateau

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Abstract

In the past few decades, the East Asian summer monsoon (EASM) has experienced an unprecedented weakening, exacerbating drought in northern China, especially in the monsoon margin area. Improving our understanding of monsoon variability will benefit agricultural production, ecological construction, and disaster management. Tree-ring is widely used as proxy data for extending the monsoon history. However, in the East Asian monsoon margin, the tree-ring width were mostly formed before the rainy season, thus may have limited ability to indicate the monsoon variability. Intra-annual density fluctuations (IADFs) can provide higher resolution information on tree growth as well as evidence of short-term climate events. Here, we used Chinese pine (Pinus tabuliformis Carr.) samples from the eastern edge of the Chinese Loess Plateau (CLP), where the climate is deeply affected by monsoon, to investigate the response of tree growth and IADFs frequency to climate variation. We show that tree-ring width and IADFs record significantly different climatic signals. The former was mainly affected by moisture conditions at the end of the previous growing season and the current spring. While the latter was common in years when severe droughts occurred in June and July, especially in June. This period coincides with the onset of the EASM, so we further analyzed the relationship between IADFs frequency and the rainy season. Both correlation analysis and the GAM model suggest that the frequent occurrence of IADFs may be related to the late start of the monsoon rainy season, meaning that we have found a new indicator in tree-ring records that can capture monsoon anomalies. Our results provide further insight into drought variation in the eastern CLP, which also implicates the Asian summer monsoon dynamic.

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Data Availability

Data that have contributed to the reported results are available from the corresponding author on request.

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Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the editors, Dr. Hung Nguyen, and another anonymous reviewer for their valuable comments.

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 41790421 and 42071057).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. MOE Key Laboratory of Western China’s Environmental Systems, College of Earth Environmental Sciences, Lanzhou University, Lanzhou, 730000, China

    Shuangjuan Wang, Yang Deng, Linlin Gao, Yuhang Zhang, Xingying Shi & Xiaohua Gou

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  1. Shuangjuan Wang
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Correspondence to Yang Deng or Linlin Gao.

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Wang, S., Deng, Y., Gao, L. et al. Influence of monsoon anomalies on intra-annual density fluctuations of Chinese pine in the Loess Plateau. Int J Biometeorol 67, 847–856 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00484-023-02459-7

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