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Are Karakoram temperatures out of phase compared to hemispheric trends?

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Abstract

In contrast to a global retreating trend, glaciers in the Karakoram showed stability and/or mass gaining during the past decades. This “Karakoram Anomaly” has been assumed to result from an out-of-phase temperature trend compared to hemispheric scales. However, the short instrumental observations from the Karakoram valley bottoms do not support a quantitative assessment of long-term temperature trends in this high mountain area. Here, we presented a new April–July temperature reconstruction from the Karakoram region in northern Pakistan based on a high elevation (~3600 m a.s.l.) tree-ring chronology covering the past 438 years (AD 1575–2012). The reconstruction passes all statistical calibration and validation tests and represents 49 % of the temperature variance recorded over the 1955–2012 instrumental period. It shows a substantial warming accounting to about 1.12 °C since the mid-twentieth century, and 1.94 °C since the mid-nineteenth century, and agrees well with the Northern Hemisphere temperature reconstructions. These findings provide evidence that the Karakoram temperatures are in-phase, rather than out-of-phase, compared to hemispheric scales since the AD 1575. The synchronous temperature trends imply that the anomalous glacier behavior reported from the Karakoram may need further explanations beyond basic regional thermal anomaly.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the Strategic Priority Research Program of Chinese Academy of Sciences (Grant No. XDB03030104) and National Natural Science foundation of China (41571201, 41525001, 41130529). The authors thank the Pakistan Meteorological Department (PMD) for providing instrumental station data. Brendan M. Buckley and Edward R. Cook (Lamont–Doherty Earth Observatory) are acknowledged for providing reconstruction data.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Key Laboratory of Alpine Ecology and Biodiversity, Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, No. 16 Lincui Road, Chaoyang District, Beijing, 100101, China

    Fayaz Asad, Haifeng Zhu, Hui Zhang, Eryuan Liang, Sher Muhammad, Iqtidar Hussain & Muhammad Atif Wazir

  2. University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, No. 19A Yuquan Road, Beijing, 100049, China

    Fayaz Asad, Sher Muhammad, Iqtidar Hussain & Muhammad Atif Wazir

  3. CAS Center for Excellence in Tibetan Plateau Earth Sciences, Beijing, 100100, China

    Haifeng Zhu & Eryuan Liang

  4. Pakistan Space and Upper Atmosphere Research Commission, SUPARCO Headquarters, SUPARCO Road, P.O. Box No. 8402, Karachi, 75270, Pakistan

    Suhaib Bin Farhan

  5. Botany Department, Federal Urdu University of Arts, Science and Technology, Gulshan-e-Iqbal, Karachi, 75300, Pakistan

    Moinuddin Ahmed

  6. Department of Earth and Environmental Systems, Indiana State University, Science 159E, Terre Haute, IN, 47809, USA

    Moinuddin Ahmed

  7. Department of Geography, Johannes Gutenberg University, 55099, Mainz, Germany

    Jan Esper

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  1. Fayaz Asad
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  2. Haifeng Zhu
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Correspondence to Haifeng Zhu.

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Asad, F., Zhu, H., Zhang, H. et al. Are Karakoram temperatures out of phase compared to hemispheric trends?. Clim Dyn 48, 3381–3390 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-016-3273-6

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