Climate during the past 250 years over the western Himalayas: a dendroclimatic reconstruction

Growth rings of conifer trees in the Himalayas have been shown to be potential tools for the reconstruction of seasonal rainfall and temperature anomalies on a wide spatial scale. Over the past decade, about 500 samples of increment cores from healthy living trees belonging to about half a dozen species have been collected. The sampling sites extend over a large area of the western Himalayas from Kashmir to the Kumaon region. The longest chronologies are mainly from the species Abies pindrow, Pincea smithiana and Cedrus deodara. Master chronologies for selected sites have been prepared based on these samples. The reconstructed temperature and precipitation series have more or less the same fluctuation characteristics as the current data. The reconstructed climatic series do not contain a clear signal related to the Little Ice Age