The influence of decision-making in tree ring-based climate reconstructions

• Published in: Nature communications 2021-06, Vol.12 (1), p.3411-3411, Article 3411
• Main Authors: Büntgen, Ulf, Allen, Kathy, Anchukaitis, Kevin J., Arseneault, Dominique, Boucher, Étienne, Bräuning, Achim, Chatterjee, Snigdhansu, Cherubini, Paolo, Churakova (Sidorova), Olga V., Corona, Christophe, Gennaretti, Fabio, Grießinger, Jussi, Guillet, Sebastian, Guiot, Joel, Gunnarson, Björn, Helama, Samuli, Hochreuther, Philipp, Hughes, Malcolm K., Huybers, Peter, Kirdyanov, Alexander V., Krusic, Paul J., Ludescher, Josef, Meier, Wolfgang J.-H., Myglan, Vladimir S., Nicolussi, Kurt, Oppenheimer, Clive, Reinig, Frederick, Salzer, Matthew W., Seftigen, Kristina, Stine, Alexander R., Stoffel, Markus, St. George, Scott, Tejedor, Ernesto, Trevino, Aleyda, Trouet, Valerie, Wang, Jianglin, Wilson, Rob, Yang, Bao, Xu, Guobao, Esper, Jan
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: 704/106/413; 704/106/694; 706/648/697; Calibration; Climate; Climate variability; Continental interfaces, environment; Datasets; Decision making; Earth and Related Environmental Sciences; Experiments; Geovetenskap och miljövetenskap; Humanities and Social Sciences; multidisciplinary; Northern Hemisphere; Science; Science (multidisciplinary); Sciences of the Universe; Summer; Temperature; Tree rings; Volcanic eruptions
• ISSN: 2041-1723; 2041-1723
• DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-23627-6

Tree-ring chronologies underpin the majority of annually-resolved reconstructions of Common Era climate. However, they are derived using different datasets and techniques, the ramifications of which have hitherto been little explored. Here, we report the results of a double-blind experiment that yielded 15 Northern Hemisphere summer temperature reconstructions from a common network of regional tree-ring width datasets. Taken together as an ensemble, the Common Era reconstruction mean correlates with instrumental temperatures from 1794–2016 CE at 0.79 ( p