Tree-Ring Data from Subantarctic Forests: Indices of Southern Hemisphere Atmosphere-Ocean Climate Variability

过去南半球中高纬度地区的气候仪器和代用记录相对较少。然而，这个高度海洋化的地区是更大规模气候变化的关键，其方式与可比的北纬地区根本不同。在中纬度南部的三个森林地区：火地岛、塔斯马尼亚岛和新西兰，已经开发出了对气候敏感的、确定年代的年轮年表，其时间跨度从最近几个世纪到过去一千年不等。然而，这些数据尚未在大规模的气候变化研究中得到充分利用。先前的研究已经证明了使用树木年轮数据作为全球各地过去大气-海洋相互作用指标的价值。该奖项支持利用这些南方树木年轮记录来模拟和重建亚南极地区气候变率的大气和海洋参数指数。这些新数据将使我们能够评估这些纬度的小冰期和中世纪暖期，以及最近和可能的未来温室变暖与南半球这部分地区过去的自然气候变化模式之间的关系。

Past instrumental and proxy records of climate are relatively scarce for the middle to high latitudes of the Southern Hemisphere. Yet this highly oceanic region is a key to larger-scale climatic change, in ways that are fundamentally different from comparable northern latitudes. Climatically-sensitive, absolutely-dated annual tree-ring chronologies have been developed for time-spans ranging from recent centuries to the past millennium for the three forested land areas at southern middle latitudes: Tierra del Fuego, Tasmania and New Zealand. However this data has yet to be fully exploited in large-scale studies of climate change. Prior research has demonstrated the value of using tree-ring data as indicators of past atmosphere-ocean interaction at sites around the globe. This award supports the utilization of these southern tree- ring records to model and reconstruct indices of atmospheric and oceanic parameters of climatic variability in the subantarctic sector. These new data will allow us to evaluate the Little Ice Age and Medieval Warm Epoch at these latitudes, and how recent and possible future greenhouse warming relates to past patterns of natural climate variability for this part of the Southern Hemisphere.