DENDROHIST

Long-term perspective to the current enviornmental crisis in the Iberian Mediterranean region from dendrochronological and historical archives

Creaf leader

DENDROHIST aims to provide long-term critical climate information for the Iberian Mediterranean region using tree-ring and historical records. The integration of these two independent paleoclimate archives will allow for a multidisciplinary approach to estimate the full range of past climate variability at different temporal and spatial scales, as well as the detailed occurrence and recurrence frequencies of extreme climate events.

Understanding past, present and future climate is crucial to predict and mitigate the impact of the current environmental crisis in our societies. Having a long-term perspective on spatio-temporal climate variability is paramount to determine to what extent current global environmental changes are unusual. Of particular concern is the increase in occurrence and intensity of extreme climate events such as droughts and floods associated to global warming.

Objective

Actions

We will jointly work as a multidisciplinary team on the challenge of integrating the information gained from dendrochronological, historical and hydraulic data to compare current conditions with historical periods, particularly the late period of the Little Ice Age (1750 onwards).

This project will capitalize on pine tree-ring samples in the east of Spain already collected in previous research project to generate gridded spatio-temporal reconstructions of temperature variability for the study region by measuring blue intensity (BI), a novel parameter that provides similar climatic information as the maximum density. In parallel, we will use and expand an existing database that contains 4571 historical flood episodes recorded by 16456 flood events across the region (1035-2021). Hydraulic reconstructions will be produced for the Ebro river basin and littoral rivers. Outputs from atmospheric reanalysis and paleoclimate models will be analyzed and integrated to determine the atmospheric patterns and main climate drivers associated to extreme events, and to compare the nature of model-simulated and proxy-related extreme hydrological episodes.

Our hydroclimate reconstructions will provide information on general atmospheric patterns and help designing sustainable water management policies, with the added value of improving the study of cultural heritage from the region through a dendroarchaeological approach.