The Tibetan Plateau (TP) is one of Earth’s most imposing topographic features. It affects climate variability and the associated Asian summer monsoon variability over the whole of China (Webster et al., 1998 P.J. Webster, V.O. Magana, T.N. Palmer, J. Shukla, R.A. Tomas, M. Yanai and T. Yasunari, Monsoons: processes, predictability, and the prospects for prediction, Journal of Geophysical Research 103 (C7) (1998), pp. 14451–14510. Full Text via CrossRef | View Record in Scopus | Cited By in Scopus (674)[Webster et al., 1998] and [Liu and Chen, 2000]). However, due to the limitation of instrumental records (spanning only approximately 50 years) and the low number of meteorological stations, little knowledge of long-term (decadal to centennial) oscillations is available. With high temporal resolution and reliability, tree rings can provide important information on long-term climate fluctuations in this area. Dendrochronology has been widely used for the reconstruction of climate variations on the TP, but most studies focus on northeastern and southeastern Tibet ([Kang et al., 1997], [Bräuning, 2001], [Bräuning and Mantwill, 2004], [Shao et al., 2005], [Shao et al., 2007], [Gou et al., 2007], [Gou et al., 2008], [Fan et al., 2008], [Liang et al., 2009], [Yang et al., 2009a] and [Yang et al., 2009b]). This paper presents an annual precipitation reconstruction spanning the past 528 years using Tibetan juniper (Juniperus tibetica Kom.) growing in the Sangri region, south-central Tibet. This reconstruction is a new contribution to the tree-ring network in western China. To the authors’ knowledge, it is the first precipitation reconstruction spanning the past centuries for the southern TP.

 

A tree-ring width chronology of 528 years was developed from Tibetan junipers (Juniperus tibetica Kom.) from south-central Tibet in western China. The correlation and response analysis displays high correlation between tree-ring width and observed mean annual precipitation series during the period 1960–2008. Based on a linear regression model, an annual (prior July to current June) precipitation series from AD 1480 to 2008 was reconstructed. This is the first well-calibrated precipitation reconstruction for south-central Tibet. The results show that periods of wet years occurred in AD 1480–1535, 1626–1639, 1651–1671, 1704–1798, 1845–1872, 1888–1907, 1917–1940 and after 1994, whereas relatively dry periods prevailed during AD 1536–1625, 1640–1650, 1672–1703, 1799–1844, 1873–1887, 1908–1916 and 1914–1993. The dry intervals in AD 1500s–1550s, 1710s–1800s, 1850s–1870s and 1900s–1920s, and the wet intervals in AD 1550s–1630s, 1680s–1720s, 1800s–1850s and 1960s–1990s occurred contemporaneously in northeastern Tibet, reflecting regional climatic variations.