Geophys. Res. Lett. http://dx.doi.org/10.1029/2011GL049927 (in the press)

Credit: © ISTOCKPHOTO.COM/DANGDUMRONG

Researchers have used samples from 20 living teak trees in Burma to plug a hole in the Asian monsoon record.

There are few long-term instrument-based climate records in Asia, so researchers turn to natural records instead. This includes tree rings from species, such as teak, that have identifiable rings from the wet and dry seasons in the tropics. In 2010, a tree-ring atlas of droughts and monsoons in Asia over the last 1,000 years was published (E. Cook et al., Science 328, 486–489; 2010), but some countries were not represented in the regional study.

Now, Rosanne D'Arrigo of the Tree-Ring Laboratory at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in New York, and colleagues, have looked at teak samples from Burma's Maingtha Reserve Forest, revealing a climate record stretching from 1613 to 2009. Their results match well with those from neighbouring countries, D'Arrigo's team reports. They recommend stitching together more such records, although intense logging makes it hard to find long-lived trees.