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Drought variation of western Chinese Loess Plateau since 1568 and its linkages with droughts in western North America

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Abstract

Understanding long-term drought variations in the past can help to evaluate ongoing and future hydroclimate change in the arid western Chinese Loess Plateau (WCLP), a region with increasing demand for water resources due to the increasing population and socioeconomic activities. Here we present a new tree-ring chronology inform the WCLP, which shows coherent interannual variations with tree-ring chronologies from 7 neighboring areas across the WCLP, suggesting a common regional climate control over tree growth. However, considerable differences are observed among their interdecadal variations, which are likely due to growth disturbances at interdecadal timescales. To deal with this issue, we use a frequency based method to develop a composite tree-ring chronology from 401 tree-ring series from these 8 sites, which shows more pronounced interdecadal variability than a chronology developed using traditional methods. The composite tree-ring chronology is used to reconstruct the annual precipitation from previous August to current July from 1568 to 2012, extending about 50 years longer than the previous longest tree-ring reconstruction from the region. The driest epoch of our reconstruction is found in the 1920s–1930s, which matches well with droughts recorded in historical documents. Over the past four centuries, a strong resemblance between drought variability in the WCLP and western North America (WNA) is evident on multidecadal timescales, but this relationship breaks down on timescales shorter than about 50 years.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Jiang Chen, Yajun Chen, Qiuyan Chen, Dan Chen and Wanying Xu for their helps in the field and the lab. This research was funded by the National Basic Research Program of China (973) (2012CB955301), National Science Foundation of China (41471172, 41690114 and U1405231), the Fellowship for Distinguished Young Scholars of Fujian Province (2015J06008), as well as the Swedish BECC, MERGE and VR grants.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Key Laboratory of Humid Subtropical Eco-geographical Process (Ministry of Education), Institute of Geography, College of Geographical Sciences, Fujian Normal University, 350007, Fuzhou, China

    Keyan Fang, Feifei Zhou, Guoyang Guo, Zhipeng Dong & Yingjun Li

  2. Regional Climate Group, Department of Earth Sciences, University of Gothenburg, Box 460, 405 30, Gothenburg, Sweden

    Keyan Fang, Deliang Chen & Hans W. Linderholm

  3. Key Laboratory of Cenozoic Geology and Environment, Institute of Geology and Geophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 100029, Beijing, China

    Keyan Fang & Zhengtang Guo

  4. University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, 100049, Beijing, China

    Zhengtang Guo

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

    Zhengtang Guo

  6. Department of Geography, University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam, Hong Kong

    Jinbao Li

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  1. Keyan Fang
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Correspondence to Keyan Fang.

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Fang, K., Guo, Z., Chen, D. et al. Drought variation of western Chinese Loess Plateau since 1568 and its linkages with droughts in western North America. Clim Dyn 49, 3839–3850 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-017-3545-9

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