Tree-ring based summer temperature reconstruction for the source region of the Yangtze River on the Tibetan Plateau

Understanding of past climatic variability over the Tibetan Plateau is still limited because of the lack of long-term climatic records. Here we reconstruct the mean summer (June–August) minimum temperature for the past 379 years based on tree-ring data in the source region of the Yangtze River. This reconstruction successfully captures recent abrupt climatic changes and agrees in general with other temperature reconstructions for the Tibetan Plateau on a decadal timescale. The cold and warm periods coincide with documented glacier advances and retreats on the east and southeast Tibetan Plateau. The interval 1816–22 is among the coldest periods in the reconstruction and may be related to the influence of the Tambora eruption in Indonesia in 1815. Comparisons with other paleoclimatic proxies imply a high degree of confidence for our reconstruction and its indicative power for a large-scale climate variability on the Tibetan Plateau.