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Palaeoclimate

Ancient trees reveal their secrets

Nature Climate Change volume 1, pages 94–95 (2011)Cite this article

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Instrumental records show that El Niño is highly variable in space and time. Now a thousand-year-long record from trees in the southwestern United States reveals even greater extremes, and a possible link between El Niño activity and climate warming.

The vast oscillation of sea surface temperature and atmospheric pressure in the tropical Pacific known as the El Niño/Southern Oscillation, or ENSO for short, is one of the most powerful drivers of short-term climate variability in the world. Instrumental observations of variables that reflect ENSO — such as sea surface temperatures in the tropical Pacific — have been made for only about the past 150 years, which is not nearly long enough to provide insights into the full range of natural variability of this important phenomenon1. Writing in Nature Climate Change, Li and colleagues2 present a record of ENSO activity over the past millennium that shows that multi-decadal cycles of increased ENSO activity are linked to a warmer eastern Pacific — an observation that might help improve efforts to predict how ENSO will behave in a warming world.

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Figure 1: A Juniper tree in Yosemite National Park.

© 2004 DANIEL GRIFFIN

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  1. Matthew Therrell is at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, Illinois 62901, USA,

    Matthew Therrell

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  1. Matthew Therrell
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Correspondence to Matthew Therrell.

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Therrell, M. Ancient trees reveal their secrets. Nature Clim Change 1, 94–95 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate1095

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