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Ensemble empirical mode decomposition for tree-ring climate reconstructions

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Abstract

A novel data adaptive method named ensemble empirical mode decomposition (EEMD) was used to reconstruct past temperature and precipitation variability in two 2,328- and 1,837-year tree-ring chronologies from the Dulan region, northeastern Qinghai–Tibetan Plateau. Our results show that EEMD can be used to extract low-frequency signals from the Dulan tree-ring data. The extracted low-frequency temperature trends in the two chronologies correlate significantly with Northern Hemisphere temperatures over the past two millennia. In addition, the newly reconstructed precipitation data have a higher standard deviation than that of data reconstructed with the conventional ordinary least squares and variance matching methods and yield the best amplitude match to the instrumental data. This study shows that EEMD is a powerful tool for extracting the full spectrum of climate information in tree-ring chronologies.

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank two anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful and constructive comments. This paper also benefited from revisions by the editor Hartmut Graßl. The study was jointly funded by CAS Strategic Priority Research Program Grant (No. XDA05080801), Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) 100 Talents Project (29082762), and NSFC (Grant Nos. 41071130 and 40871091). Feng Shi was supported by West Light Program for Talent Cultivation of Chinese Academy of Sciences. Bao Yang gratefully acknowledges the support of K.C. Wong Education Foundation. Hong Kong. LvG was supported by Swiss NSF (PBBEP2-126056).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Key Laboratory of Desert and Desertification, Cold and Arid Regions Environmental and Engineering Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 320 Donggang West Road, 730000, Lanzhou, China

    Feng Shi, Bao Yang, Chun Qin & Zhangyong Wang

  2. Institute of Geography and Oeschger Centre for Climate Change Research, University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland

    L. von Gunten

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  1. Feng Shi
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  2. Bao Yang
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  3. L. von Gunten
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  4. Chun Qin
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Correspondence to Bao Yang.

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Fig. S1

Comparison between the low-frequency (IMFs 8-10) signal of the Northern Hemisphere temperature reconstructions and the two Dulan chronologies. All series were decomposed using the EEMD approach. (PDF 48 kb)

Table S1

Results of the EEMD method applied to two tree-ring chronologies and to temperature and precipitation records from Dulan (XLS 14018 kb)

Table S2

The quasi-period of each IMF in the meteorological temperature and precipitation series and of the two tree-ring series Z03 and S04 (DOC 46 kb)

Table S3

Correlation analysis of the precipitation and temperature data with the two tree-ring chronologies Z03 and S04 in five time–frequency domains (DOC 57 kb)

Table S4

Statistical validation of the reconstructions, skill assessments, and uncertainty estimations (DOC 46 kb)

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Shi, F., Yang, B., von Gunten, L. et al. Ensemble empirical mode decomposition for tree-ring climate reconstructions. Theor Appl Climatol 109, 233–243 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00704-011-0576-8

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