Precipitation reconstruction for Northwestern Tunisia from tree rings

An October–June precipitation reconstruction was developed from a Pinus halepensis regional tree-ring chronology from four sites in northwestern Tunisia for the period of 1771–2002. The reconstruction is based on a reliable and replicable statistical relationship between climate and tree-ring growth and shows climate variability on both interannual and interdecadal time scales. Thresholds (12th and 88th percentiles) based on the empirical cumulative distribution of observed precipitation for the 1902–2002 calibration period were used to delineate dry years and wet years of the long-term reconstruction. The longest reconstructed drought by this classification in the 232-year reconstruction is 2 years, which occurred in the 19th century. Analysis of 500 mb height data for the period 1948–2002 suggests reconstructed extreme dry and wet events can provide information on past atmospheric circulation anomalies over a broad region including the Mediterranean, Europe and eastern Asia.