Near East Project Summary:

Title: Near East Climate Variability from Tree-Ring

Principal Investigator: R. Touchan; CO-P.I.: M.K. Hughes

The Near East is currently poor in developed annual resolution proxy records of climate extending back into pre-industrial times. We propose to fill this gap by establishing reconstructions of past climate in the region using tree rings. In order to do this we will:

1. develop new tree-ring chronologies for the region;
2. examine interrelationships and correlation among the chronologies;
3. study the effect of climate on tree-ring growth; and
4. develop tree-ring reconstructions of climate over the past several centuries for this region.

This will be a contribution to IGBP/ PAGES as an international effort to describe and understand interannual to century scale variability of climate. These new reconstructions of precipitation, temperature, and circulation indices, will contribute to understanding of climate variability in mid-latitudes, especially in the winter half-year. Such information already exists for similar latitudes in North America and northwest Africa, but is rather sparse elsewhere in the Old World. Thus, for example, the study of the effects of the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) on multidecadal to century time scales is hampered by the lack of information for this region. Further, we expect that the records we develop will be of value in improving the reliability of multi-proxy, hemispheric-scale reconstructions, such as those reported by Mann et al. (1998; 1999).