Paleo Data Search

Although global and Northern Hemisphere temperature reconstructions are coherent with climate model simulations over the last millennium, reconstructed temperatures tend to diverge from simulations at smaller spatial scales. Yet, it remains unclear to what extent these regional peculiarities reflect region-specific internal climate variability or inadequate proxy coverage and quality. Here, we present a high-quality, millennial-long summer temperature reconstruction for northeastern North America, based on maximum latewood density, the most temperature-sensitive tree-ring proxy. Our reconstruction shows that a large majority (31 out of 44) of the coldest extremes can be attributed to explosive volcanic eruptions, with more persistent cooling following large tropical than extratropical events. These forced climate variations synchronize regional summer temperatures with hemispheric reconstructions and simulations at the multidecadal time scale. Our study highlights that tropical volcanism is the major driver of multidecadal temperature variations across spatial scales.