资源环境科技发展态势分析平台

Lack of long-term tree-ring records in the core regions of the Asian summer monsoon in southeastern China limits our ability of evaluating the current climate change in a historical context. In this study, we developed the first 218-year treering chronology (1798-2015) of Pinus massoniana in Zhangping area, Fujian Province, humid subtropical China. This chronology is positively correlated with winter-spring (January-March) temperature (r = 0.359, p < .01) and summer (July-September) precipitation (r = 0.351, p < .01). Although the correlations between our tree rings with sea surface temperatures (SSTs) are not very high, the correlation pattern is very close to the correlation pattern with the El Nino-Southern Oscillation variability (ENSO). These suggest that the ENSO could be the major large-scale regulator on the growth of our tree rings. The strength of the correlations between our tree rings and the ENSO (r = 0.30, N = 66) matches closely with the ENSO variability during 1950-2015. The modulations of the ENSO on regional tree growth have been the most conspicuous since the 1950s, which corresponds to its enhanced inter-annual variability. The extreme growth anomalies match quite well with the extreme years of the moisture-sensitive chronologies. The dry epoch from 1935 to 1958 is the most severe long-lasting drought in our tree rings, which is a widely distributed pattern in southeastern China and is likely modulated by the La Nina-like modes in that period.