Long-time series of high-resolution temperature record from Chinese Loess Plateau is rare. An April-September mean temperature reconstruction (1826-2004) has been developed for the north-central Shaanxi Province, China, based on tree-ring width analysis. The reconstruction captures 39.3% (p<0.001) of the variance in the instrumental data over the calibration period from 1951 to 2002. The reconstruction shows a high temperature period of 1928-1933, which coincides with the timing of the extreme drought event in 1920s in the entire northern China. The two low temperature periods in reconstruction are 1883-1888 and 1938-1942. With the global warming, the April-September mean temperature in study area has also increased since the 1970s, but has not exceeded the temperature in 1928-1933. Besides the statistical analysis, the reconstruction is also verified by the local dryness/wetness index and other dendroclimatological results.
Three well-dated Sabina Przewalskii ring-width chronologies from Dulan, China, have been used to reconstruct annual precipitation (from prior July to current June) variations on the northeast Tibetan Plateau since 850 AD. The reconstructions account of the instrumentally recorded precipitation variance are: 54.7% for the period of 1385-2000AD; 50.5% for 1099-1384AD and 45.7% for 850-1098AD. On the millenary scale, the precipitation variation over this region displays “W” shape, which has three peaks and two valleys. The precipitation is low during 1571-1879 AD, and high during 1880-2000 AD. 1900-2000 AD is the century with the highest precipitation over the northeast Tibetan Plateau in the last 1000 years, and 1962-2000 is the period with the highest pre- cipitation, and the highest variability of precipitation as well in the last 1000 years. The reconstructed series also reveals that the variability of annual precipitation is large when the precipitation is more, and contrarily, variability is small when the precipitation is low. With the temperature increasing obvi- ously in the 20th century, the precipitation in the study region significantly increased too, the variability of precipitation became larger, and drought and flooding occurred more frequently. The yearly tree-ring width (high frequency signal) series in this region reflects the local annually precipitation variation. However, the series with 40-year moving average (low frequency signal) cor- responds to the Northern Hemisphere temperature variations on the decadal to centurial scale. It correlates significantly with seven temperature curves of the Northern Hemisphere in the different time spans. For example, the correlation coefficients with the most temperature curves are around 0.9 during the period of 1852-1982 AD. In general, the temperature and the precipitation change syn- chronously in the Dulan region. It means that low temperature corresponds to low precipitation, andvice versa. This relationship may indicate that the climatic pattern i
