Abstract
We present a simple, efficient, process-based forward model of tree-ring growth, called Vaganov–Shashkin-Lite (VS-Lite), that requires as inputs only latitude and monthly temperature and precipitation. Simulations of six bristlecone pine ring-width chronologies demonstrate the interpretability of model output as an accurate representation of the climatic controls on growth. Ensemble simulations by VS-Lite of two networks of North American ring-width chronologies correlate with observations at higher significance levels on average than simulations formed by regression of ring width on the principal components of the same monthly climate data. VS-Lite retains more skill outside of calibration intervals than does the principal components regression approach. It captures the dominant low- and high-frequency spatiotemporal ring-width signals in the network with an inhomogeneous, multivariate relationship to climate. Because continuous meteorological data are most widely available at monthly temporal resolution, our model extends the set of sites at which forward-modeling studies are possible. Other potential uses of VS-Lite include generation of synthetic ring-width series for pseudo-proxy studies, as a data level model in data assimilation-based climate reconstructions, and for bias estimation in actual ring-width index series.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Akaike H (1974) A new look at the statistical model identification. IEEE Trans Automat Control AC19:716–723
Anchukaitis K, Evans M, Kaplan A, Vaganov E, Hughes M, Grissino-Mayer H, Cane M (2006) Forward modeling of regional scale tree-ring patterns in the southeastern United States and the recent influence of summer drought. Geophys Res Lett 33. doi:10.1029/2005GL025050
Bretherton C, Smith C, Wallace J (1992) An intercomparison of methods for finding coupled patterns in climate data. J Clim 5:541–560
Briffa K, Schweingruber F, Jones P, Osbourn T, Harris I, Shiyatov S, Vaganov E, Grudd H (1998) Trees tell of past climates: but are they speaking less clearly today. Philos Trans R Soc B 353:65–73
Cook E, Meko D, Stahle D, Cleaveland M (1999) Drought reconstructions for the continental United States. J Clim 12:1145–1162
Daly C, Halbleib M, Smith J, Gibson W, Doggett M, Taylor G, Curtis J, Pasteris P (2008) Physiographically sensitive mapping of climatological temperature and precipitation across the coterminous United States. Int J Climatol 28:2031–2064. doi:10.1002/joc.1688
D’Arrigo R, Wilson R, Cherubini P (2008) On the ‘divergence problem’ in northern forests: a review of the tree-ring evidence and possible causes. Glob Planet Change 60:289–305. doi:10.1016/j.gloplacha.2007.03.004
Deslauriers A, Rossi S, Anfodillo T, Saracino A (2008) Cambial phenology, wood formation and temperature thresholds in two contrasting years at high altitude in southern Italy. Tree Physiol (Oxford, U K) 28:863–871
Evans MN, Kaplan A, Cane MA, Villalba R (2001) Globality and optimality in climate field reconstructions from proxy data. In: Markgraf V (ed) Interhemispheric climate linkages. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp 53–72
Evans MN, Reichert BK, Kaplan A, Anchukaitis KJ, Vaganov EA, Hughes MK, Cane MA (2006) A forward modeling approach to paleoclimatic interpretation of tree-ring data. J Geophys Res (Biogeosci) 111(G03008). doi:10.1029/2006JG000166
Fritts H, Shashkin A, Hemming D, Leavitt S, Wright W, Downs G (2000) User manual for TREERING 2000, http://www.ltrr.arizona.edu/hal/treering/manual2000.pdf, model and documentation available online at http://www.ltrr.arizona.edu/software.html
Fritts HC (1991) Reconstructing large-scale climatic patterns from tree ring data: a diagnostic analysis. University of Arizona Press, Tucson
Fritts HC (2001) Tree rings and climate. The Blackburn Press, New York
Fritts HC, Smith DG, Cardis JW, Budelsky C (1965) Tree-ring characteristics along a vegetation gradient in northern Arizona. Ecology 46:394–401. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1934872
Fye F, Stahle D, Cook E (2003) Paleoclimate analogs to twentieth-century moisture regimes across the United States. Bull Am Meteorol Soc 84. doi:10.1175/BAMS-84-7-901
Garreta V, Miller P, Guiot J, Hely C, Brewer S, Sykes M, Litt T (2010) A method for climate and vegetation reconstruction through the inversion of a dynamic vegetation model. Clim Dyn 35:371–389. doi:10.1007/s00382-009-0629-1
Gates DM (1980) Biophysical ecology. Springer, New York
Guiot J, Torre F, Jolly D, Peyron O, Boreaux J, Cheddadi R (2000) Inverse vegetation modeling by monte carlo sampling to reconstruct palaeoclimates under changed precipitation seasonality and CO2 conditions: application to glacial climate in Mediterranean region. Ecol Model 127:119–1140
Guiot J, Wu V Garreta, HB, Hatte C, Magny M (2009) A few prospective ideas on climate reconstruction: from a statistical single proxy approach towards a multi-proxy and dynamical approach. Clim Past 5:571–583. http://www.clim-past.net/5/571/2009
Hoerling M, Quan X, Eischeid J (2009) Distinct causes for two principal U.S. droughts of the 20th century. Geophys Res Lett 36. doi:10.1029/2009GL039860
Huang J, van den Dool HM, Georgankakos KP (1996) Analysis of model-calculated soil moisture over the United States (1931–1993) and applications to long-range temperature forecasts. J Clim 9:1350–1362
Hughes MK, Ammann CM (2009) The future of the past—an earth system framework for high resolution paleoclimatology: editorial essay. Clim Change 94:247–259. doi:10.1007/s10584-009-9588-0
Jones P, Briffa K, Osborn T, Lough J, van Ommen T, Vinther B, Luterbacher J, Wahl ER, Zwiers F, Mann M, Schmidt G, Ammann C, Buckly B, Cobb K, Esper J, Goosse H, Graham N, Jansen E, Kiefer T, Kull C, Kuttel M, Mosley-Thompson E, Overpeck J, Riedwyl N, Schulz M, Tudhope A, Villalba R, Wanner H, Wolff E, Xoplaki E (2009) High-resolution palaeoclimatology of the last millennium: a review of current status and future prospects. Holocene 19:3–49. doi:10.1177/0959683608098952
Jones PD, Briffa KR, Barnett SFB (1998) High-resolution palaeoclimatic records for the last millennium: interpretation, integration and comparison with general circulation model control-run temperatures. Holocene 8:455–471. doi:10.1191/095968398667194956
Kipfmueller K, Salzer M (2010) Linear trend and climate response of five-needle pines in the western United States related to treeline proximity. Can J For Res 40(1):134–142. doi:10.1139/X09-187
Kirdyanov A, Vaganov E, Hughes M (2007) Separating the climatic signal from tree-ring width and maximum latewood density records. Trees Struct Funct 21:37–44. doi:10.1007/s00468-006-0094-y
Korner C, Paulsen J (2004) A world-wide study of high altitude treeline temperatures. J Biogeogr 31:713–732. doi:10.1111/j.1365-2699.2003.01043.x
Li B, Nychka D, Ammann C (2010) The value of multiproxy reconstruction of past climate. J Am Stat Assoc 105(491):883–895. doi:10.1198/jasa.2010.ap09379
Mann M, Rutherford S (2002) Climate reconstruction using ‘pseudoproxies’. Geophys Res Lett 29(1501). doi:10.1029/2001GL014554
Mann ME, Bradley RS, Hughes MK (1999) Northern hemisphere temperatures during the past millennium: inferences, uncertainties and limitations. Geophys Res Lett 26:759–762
Mann ME, Zhang Z, Hughes MK, Bradley RS, Miller SK, Rutherford S, Ni F (2008) Proxy-based reconstructions of hemispheric and global surface temperature variations over the past two millennia. Proc Nat Acad Sci USA 105:13252–13257. doi:10.1073/pnas.0805721105
Misson L (2004) MAIDEN: a model for analyzing ecosystem processes in dendroecology. Can J For Res 34:874–887. doi:10.1139/x03-252
Monserud R (1986) Time-series analysis of tree-ring chronologies. For Sci 32:349–372
New M, Hulme M, Jones P (2000) Representing twentieth-century space–time climate variability. Part II: development of 1901–96 monthly grids of terrestrial climate. J Clim 13:2217–2238
Preisendorfer RW (1988) Principal component analysis in meteorology and oceanography. New York
Rathgeber C, Nicault A, Kaplan J, Guiot J (2003) Using a biogeochemistry model in simulating forests productivity responses to climatic change and [CO2] increase: example of Pinus halepensis in Provence (south-east France). Ecol Model 166:239–255. doi:10.1016/S0304-3800(03)00161-3
Rossi S, Deslauriers A, Anfodillo T, Carraro V (2007) Evidence of threshold temperatures for xylogenesis in conifers at high altitudes. Oecologia 152:1432–1939. doi:10.1007/s00442-006-0625-7
Salzer MW, Hughes MK, Bunn AG, Kipfmueller KF (2009) Recent unprecedented tree-ring greowth in bristlecone pine at the highest elevations and possible causes. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 106:20348–20353. doi:10.1073/pnas.0903029106
Seager R, Burgman R, Kushnir Y, Clement A, Cook E, Naik N, Miller J (2008) Tropical pacific forcing of north american medieval megadroughts: testing the concept with an atmosphere model forved by coral-reconstructed ssts. J Clim. doi:10.1175/2008JCLI2170.1
Smerdon J, Kaplan A, Chang D, Evans M (2010) A pseudoproxy evaluation of the CCA and RegEM methods for reconstructing climate fields of the last millennium. J Clim 21 (in press)
Tingley M, Huybers P (2010) A bayesian algorithm for reconstructing climate anomalies in space and time. Part I: development and applications to paleoclimate reconstruction problems. J Clim 23:2759–2781. doi:10.1175/2009JCLI3015.1
Tingley M, Huybers P (2010) A bayesian algorithm for reconstructing climate anomalies in space and time. Part II: comparison with the regularized expectation-maximization algorithm. J Clim 23:2782–2800. doi:10.1175/2009JCLI3016.1
Vaganov E, Anchukaitis K, Evans M (2010) How well understood are the processes that create dendroclimatic records? A mechanistic model of climatic control on conifer tree-ring growth dynamics. In: Hughes M, Swetnam T, Diaz H (eds) Dendroclimatology: progress and prospects. Developments in Paleoecological Research, chap 3. Springer, New York (in press)
Vaganov EA, Hughes MK, Shashkin AV (2006) Growth dynamics of conifer tree rings. In: Ecological studies, vol 183. Springer, New York
van den Dool H, Huang J, Fan Y (2003) Performance and analysis of the constructed analogue method applied to U.S. soil moisture over 1981–2001. J Geophys Res 108(8617). doi:10.1029/2002JD003114
Von Storch H, Zwiers F (1999) Statistical analysis in climate research. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
von Storch H, Zorito E, Gonzalez-Rouco F (2009) Assessment of three temperature reconstruction methods in the virtual reality of a climate simulation. Int J Earth Sci 98:67–82. doi:10.1007/s00531-008-0349-5
Wallace J, Smith C, Bretherton C (1992) Singular value decomposition of wintertime sea-surface temperature and 500-mb height anomalies. J Clim 5:561–576
Weare C, Navato A, Newell R (1976) Empirical orthogonal analysis of pacific sea-surface temperatures. J Phys Oceanogr 6(5):671–678
Wilson R, Elling W (2004) Temporal instability in tree-growth/climate response in Lower Bavarian Forest region: implications for dendroclimatic reconstruction. Trees Struct Funct 18. doi:10.1007/s00468-003-0273-z
Wilson R, D’Arrigo R, Buckley B, Buntgen U, Esper J, Frank D, Luckman B, Payette S, Vose R, Youngblut D (2007) A matter of divergence: Tracking recent warming at hemispheric scales using tree ring data. J Geophys Res Atmos 112. doi:10.1029/2006JD008318
Woodhouse C, Kunkel K, Easterling D, Cook E (2005) The twentieth-century pluvial in the western United States. Geophys Res Lett 32. doi:10.1029/2005GL022413
Acknowledgements
We thank Kurt Kipfmueller and Matt Salzer for providing data for the 5N network; the same two authors and Andy Bunn for sharing the bristlecone pine chronologies; contributors to the International Tree Ring Data Bank of the World Data Center for Paleoclimatology which was the source for the M08 network. We thank Connie Woodhouse for sharing her insights into regional climatic patterns captured by the 5N network, and Brooke Rabe for her input on writing statistical code. Thanks to the PRISM Climate Group at Oregon State University (http://www.prismclimate.org) for making their product publicly available, and to Benno Blumenthal for making the gridded PRISM product available on the IRI/LDEO Data Catalog (http://iridl.ldeo.columbia.edu/). We are grateful to Martin Tingley and Joel Guiot for their thorough comments and feedback, which greatly improved the structure of the paper. Support for this work was provided by NSF/CMG grant 0724802, NOAA/CPO grant NA060AR4310115, NOAA grant NA07OAR4310060, and NOAA grant NA07OAR4310424.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
An erratum to this article can be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00382-011-1062-9
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Tolwinski-Ward, S.E., Evans, M.N., Hughes, M.K. et al. An efficient forward model of the climate controls on interannual variation in tree-ring width. Clim Dyn 36, 2419–2439 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-010-0945-5
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-010-0945-5