An evaluation of english oak earlywood vessel area as a climate proxy in the UK
D. E. Davies, Neil J. Loader
Abstract
This research evaluates the usefulness of oak earlywood vessel area as a climate proxy in the western United Kingdom (UK). The results demonstrate that at this site earlywood vessel area contains a different environmental signal (March relative humidity) to a ring-width chronology developed from the same trees. The vessel area signal passes commonly used verification statistics and was found to be representative of the climate of a similar geographic area to other tree-ring proxies, albeit with a lower explained variance. Taking the average of all the vessels identified for each year weakened the reconstructed climate signal and it was found for this study that the average of the 10 largest vessels provided the strongest and most stable match. The results demonstrate earlywood vessel area of oak in the UK has potential as a climate proxy, but that further work to strengthen and characterise the climatic target variable controlling vessel area is required.