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Streamflow variability in the Chilean Temperate-Mediterranean climate transition (35°S–42°S) during the last 400 years inferred from tree-ring records

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Abstract

As rainfall in South-Central Chile has decreased in recent decades, local communities and industries have developed an understandable concern about their threatened water supply. Reconstructing streamflows from tree-ring data has been recognized as a useful paleoclimatic tool in providing long-term perspectives on the temporal characteristics of hydroclimate systems. Multi-century long streamflow reconstructions can be compared to relatively short instrumental observations in order to analyze the frequency of low and high water availability through time. In this work, we have developed a Biobío River streamflow reconstruction to explore the long-term hydroclimate variability at the confluence of the Mediterranean-subtropical and the Temperate-humid climate zones, two regions represented by previous reconstructions of the Maule and Puelo Rivers, respectively. In a suite of analyses, the Biobío River reconstruction proves to be more similar to the Puelo River than the Maule River, despite its closer geographic proximity to the latter. This finding corroborates other studies with instrumental data that identify 37.5°S as a latitudinal confluence of two climate zones. The analyzed rivers are affected by climate forcings on interannual and interdecadal time-scales, Tropical (El Niño Southern Oscillation) and Antarctic (Southern Annular Mode; SAM). Longer cycles found, around 80-years, are well correlated only with SAM variation, which explains most of the variance in the Biobío and Puelo rivers. This cycle also has been attributed to orbital forcing by other authors. All three rivers showed an increase in the frequency of extreme high and low flow events in the twentieth century. The most extreme dry and wet years in the instrumental record (1943–2000) were not the most extreme of the past 400-years reconstructed for the three rivers (1600–2000), yet both instrumental record years did rank in the five most extreme of the streamflow reconstructions as a whole. These findings suggest a high level of natural variability in the hydro-climatic conditions of the region, where extremes characterized the twentieth century. This information is particularly useful when evaluating and improving a wide variety of water management models that apply to water resources that are sensitive to agricultural and hydropower industries.

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Acknowledgments

Support was provided by Inter-American Institute for Global Change Research CRN II # 2047 supported by the US National Science Foundation (GEO-0452325) and the Chilean Research Council (CONICYT: Inserción de Capital Humano Avanzado en el Sector Productivo Chileno 781301007; FONDECYT 1121106; FONDECYT 1151427; FONDECYT 1130410 and the Center for Climate and Resilience Research (CR)2 FONDAP 15110009). This study was completed using the facilities of the PrairieAdaptation Research Collaborative at the University of Regina, Canada, where support came from the IDRC sponsored VACEA project.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Instituto de Geografía, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, Avda. Brasil 2241, Valparaiso, Chile

    Ariel A. Muñoz, Paulina Puchi, Isadora Toledo-Guerrero & Isabella Aguilera-Betti

  2. Departamento de Geología, Facultad de Ciencias Físicas y Matemáticas, Universidad de Chile, Santiago, Chile

    Alvaro González-Reyes

  3. Advanced Mining Technology Centre (AMTC), Facultad de Ciencias Físicas y Matemáticas, Universidad de Chile, Santiago, Chile

    Alvaro González-Reyes

  4. Instituto de Conservación, Biodiversidad y Territorio, Universidad Austral de Chile, Valdivia, Chile

    Antonio Lara, Duncan Christie, Rocío Urrutia-Jalabert & Carlos LeQuesne

  5. Center for Climate and Resilience Research [CR]2, Santiago, Chile

    Antonio Lara & Duncan Christie

  6. Prairie Adaptation Research Collaborative (PARC), University of Regina, Regina, Canada

    David Sauchyn & Jessica Vanstone

  7. Instituto Argentino de Nivología, Glaciología y Ciencias Ambientales (IANIGLA), Mendoza, Argentina

    Ignacio Mundo & Ricardo Villalba

  8. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales (FCEN), Universidad Nacional de Cuyo, Mendoza, Argentina

    Ignacio Mundo

  9. Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research (LTRR), University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA

    Paul R. Sheppard & Paul Szejner

  10. Tree-Ring Laboratory, Department of Geosciences, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, AR, USA

    Daniel Stahle

  11. Centro de Estudios Ambientales, Universidad Austral de Chile, Valdivia, Chile

    Paul Szejner

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  1. Ariel A. Muñoz
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  2. Alvaro González-Reyes
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Correspondence to Ariel A. Muñoz.

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Muñoz, A.A., González-Reyes, A., Lara, A. et al. Streamflow variability in the Chilean Temperate-Mediterranean climate transition (35°S–42°S) during the last 400 years inferred from tree-ring records. Clim Dyn 47, 4051–4066 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-016-3068-9

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