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Dendrochronology is the study of past climate change through examination of tree ring growth. Andrew Ellicott Douglass from the University of Arizona first used this specialized branch of science in the early 1900s. Douglass was the first to realize that the wide rings of certain species of trees were produced during years with ample rainfall and favorable growing conditions
Trees contain some of nature's most accurate evidence of the past. Their growth layers, appearing as rings in the cross section of the tree trunk, record evidence of disastrous floods, insect attacks, lightning strikes, and even earthquakes that occurred during the lifespan of the tree. They also hold excellent records of climate.
The scientific discipline called dendrochronology is the study of tree rings and of environmental conditions and events of the past that tree growth can reflect. The beginning of scientific study of tree rings is generally ascribed to an astronomer named Andrew Ellicott Douglass, who in the early 1900s noticed not only variation in tree-ring width but also that this variability was similar between multiple trees.
Dendrochronology is the formal term for tree-ring dating, the science that uses the growth rings of trees as a detailed record of climatic change in a region, as well as a way to approximate the date of construction for wooden objects of many types.
From the ice sheets of Antarctica and the seabed of the Atlantic, to the boreal forests of Europe and corals of southeast Asia, proxy data is found across the Earth’s land and ocean.
NOAA holds an archive of more than 10,000 proxy datasets covering more than a dozen categories. With its permission, Carbon Brief has mapped this data.
Use the categories in the legend on the left to select a particular proxy or archive type, and the buttons in the top-right hand corner to zoom in and out. Clicking on an individual data point will reveal the period covered by the data, the site name and a link to NOAA’s reference webpage for further information.
Today, we can measure the atmosphere using instruments on the ground, on boats, on ocean buoys, on aeroplanes, on satellites and with radar. But if we want to know what the weather was doing before we had these sorts of instruments, we have to look at other ways temperature and rainfall are recorded.
Peter Brown from Rocky Mountain Tree Ring Research explains dendrochronology and how we can use it to understand the climate.
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The characteristics of the rings inside a tree can tell scientists how old a tree is and what the weather conditions were like during each year of that tree’s life. Very old trees can offer clues about what the climate in an area was like long before measurements were recorded
Most of us learned as children that the age of a tree could be found by counting its rings. Rings of trees growing in temperate climates can indeed tell their age through their annual rings and also help determine the age of wood used to construct buildings or wooden objects.
Tree rings have been used in various applications to reconstruct past climates as well as to assess the effects of recent climatic and environmental change on tree growth. In this paper we briefly review two ways that tree rings provide information about climate change and CO2
How using tree rings to look into the past can teach us about the climate changes we face in the future.
The LTRR is an academic research unit based in the College of Science. Worldwide the LTRR is a preeminent center of dendrochronology – using the information stored in the annual rings of trees to understand and quantify interactions among our Earth’s climate, ecosystems, and societies.