Abstract
Accurate modelling and prediction of the local to continental-scale hydroclimate response to global warming is essential given the strong impact of hydroclimate on ecosystem functioning, crop yields, water resources, and economic security1,2,3,4. However, uncertainty in hydroclimate projections remains large5,6,7, in part due to the short length of instrumental measurements available with which to assess climate models. Here we present a spatial reconstruction of hydroclimate variability over the past twelve centuries across the Northern Hemisphere derived from a network of 196 at least millennium-long proxy records. We use this reconstruction to place recent hydrological changes8,9 and future precipitation scenarios7,10,11 in a long-term context of spatially resolved and temporally persistent hydroclimate patterns. We find a larger percentage of land area with relatively wetter conditions in the ninth to eleventh and the twentieth centuries, whereas drier conditions are more widespread between the twelfth and nineteenth centuries. Our reconstruction reveals that prominent seesaw patterns of alternating moisture regimes observed in instrumental data12,13,14 across the Mediterranean, western USA, and China have operated consistently over the past twelve centuries. Using an updated compilation of 128 temperature proxy records15, we assess the relationship between the reconstructed centennial-scale Northern Hemisphere hydroclimate and temperature variability. Even though dry and wet conditions occurred over extensive areas under both warm and cold climate regimes, a statistically significant co-variability of hydroclimate and temperature is evident for particular regions. We compare the reconstructed hydroclimate anomalies with coupled atmosphere–ocean general circulation model simulations and find reasonable agreement during pre-industrial times. However, the intensification of the twentieth-century-mean hydroclimate anomalies in the simulations, as compared to previous centuries, is not supported by our new multi-proxy reconstruction. This finding suggests that much work remains before we can model hydroclimate variability accurately, and highlights the importance of using palaeoclimate data to place recent and predicted hydroclimate changes in a millennium-long context16,17.
This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution
Access options
Subscribe to this journal
Receive 51 print issues and online access
$199.00 per year
only $3.90 per issue
Buy this article
- Purchase on Springer Link
- Instant access to full article PDF
Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout
Similar content being viewed by others
References
D’Odorico, P. & Bhattachan, A. Hydrologic variability in dryland regions: impacts on ecosystem dynamics and food security. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. Lond. B 367, 3145–3157 (2012)
Field, C. B. et al. (eds) Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability. Part A: Global and Sectoral Aspects. Contribution of Working Group II to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2013)
Cook, B. I., Smerdon, J. E., Seager, R. & Coats, S. Global warming and 21st century drying. Clim. Dyn. 43, 2607–2627 (2014)
Schewe, J. et al. Multi-model assessment of water scarcity under climate change. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 111, 3245–3250 (2014)
Held, I. M. & Soden, B. J. Robust responses of the hydrological cycle to global warming. J. Clim. 19, 5686–5699 (2006)
Stephens, G. L. et al. Dreary state of precipitation in global models. J. Geophys. Res. 115, D24211 (2010)
Collins, M. et al. In Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis (eds Stocker, T. F. et al.) 1029–1136 (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2013)
Sheffield, J., Wood, E. F. & Roderick, M. L. Little change in global drought over the past 60 years. Nature 491, 435–438 (2012)
Greve, P. et al. Global assessment of trends in wetting and drying over land. Nature Geosci . 7, 716–721 (2014)
O’Gorman, P. & Schneider, T. The physical basis for increases in precipitation extremes in simulations of 21st-century climate change. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 106, 14773–14777 (2009)
Orlowsky, B. & Seneviratne, S. I. Elusive drought: Uncertainty in observed trends and short- and long-term CMIP5 projections. Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci. 17, 1765–1781 (2013)
Xoplaki, E., González-Rouco, J. F., Luterbacher, J. & Wanner, H. Wet season Mediterranean precipitation variability: influence of large-scale dynamics and predictability. Clim. Dyn. 23, 63–78 (2004)
Steinman, B. et al. Ocean–atmosphere forcing of centennial hydroclimate variability in the Pacific Northwest. Geophys. Res. Lett. 41, 2553–2560 (2014)
Chen, J. et al. Hydroclimatic changes in China and surroundings during the Medieval Climate Anomaly and Little Ice Age: spatial patterns and possible mechanisms. Quat. Sci. Rev. 107, 98–111 (2015)
Ljungqvist, F. C., Krusic, P. J., Brattström, G. & Sundqvist, H. S. Northern Hemisphere temperature patterns in the last 12 centuries. Clim. Past 8, 227–249 (2012)
Braconnot, P. et al. Evaluation of climate models using palaeoclimatic data. Nature Clim. Change 2, 417–424 (2012)
Masson-Delmotte, V. et al. in Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (eds Stocker, T. F. et al.) 383–464 (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2013)
Trenberth, K. Changes in precipitation with climate change. Clim. Res . 47, 123–138 (2011)
Dai, A. Increasing drought under global warming in observations and models. Nature Clim. Change 3, 52–58 (2012)
Cook, E. R., Woodhouse, C. A., Eakin, C. M., Meko, D. M. & Stahle, D. W. Long term aridity changes in the western United States. Science 306, 1015–1018 (2004)
Cook, E. R. et al. Asian monsoon failure and megadrought during the last millennium. Science 328, 486–489 (2010)
Evans, M. N., Smerdon, J. E., Kaplan, A., Tolwinski-Ward, S. E. & González-Rouco, J. F. Climate field reconstruction uncertainty arising from multivariate and nonlinear properties of predictors. Geophys. Res. Lett. 41, 9127–9134 (2014)
Schmidt, G. A. et al. Climate forcing reconstructions for use in PMIP simulation of the last millennium (v1.1). Geosci. Model Dev . 5, 185–191 (2012)
Broecker, W. S. & Putnam, A. E. Hydrologic impacts of past shifts of Earth’s thermal equator offer insight into those to be produced by fossil fuel CO2 . Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 110, 16710–16715 (2013)
Schneider, T., Bischoff, T. & Haug, G. H. Migrations and dynamics of the intertropical convergence zone. Nature 513, 45–53 (2014)
DeAngelis, A. M., Qu, X., Zelinka, M. D. & Hall, A. An observational radiative constraint on hydrologic cycle intensification. Nature 528, 249–253 (2015)
Mauritsen, T. et al. Climate feedback efficiency and synergy. Clim. Dyn. 41, 2539–2554 (2013)
Zhang, X. et al. Detection of human influence on twentieth-century precipitation trends. Nature 448, 461–465 (2007)
Allan, R. P. & Soden, B. J. Atmospheric warming and the amplification of precipitation extremes. Science 321, 1481–1484 (2008)
Polson, D., Hegerl, G., Allan, R. & Sarojini, B. B. Have greenhouse gases intensified the contrast between wet and dry regions? Geophys. Res. Lett. 40, 4783–4787 (2013)
Jones, P., Osborn, T. & Briffa, K. Estimating sampling errors in large-scale temperature averages. J. Clim. 10, 2548–2568 (1997)
Datta, S., Jones, W. L., Roy, B. & Tokay, A. Spatial variability of surface rainfall as observed from TRMM field campaign data. J. Appl. Meteorol. 42, 598–610 (2003)
Wan, H., Zhang, X., Zwiers, F. W. & Shiogama, H. Effect of data coverage on the estimation of mean and variability of precipitation at global and regional scales. J. Geophys. Res. 118, 534–546 (2013)
Mitchell, T. D. & Jones, P. D. An improved method of constructing a database of monthly climate observations and associated high-resolution grids. Int. J. Clim. 25, 693–712 (2005)
González-Rouco, F., Beltrami, H., Zorita, E. & von Storch, H. Simulation and inversion of borehole temperature profiles in surrogate climates: spatial distribution and surface coupling. Geophys. Res. Lett. 33, L01703 (2006)
Taylor, K. E., Stouffer, R. J. & Meehl, G. A. An overview of CMIP5 and the experiment design. Bull. Am. Meteorol. Soc. 93, 485–498 (2012)
Xin, X., Wu, T. & Zhang, J. Introduction of CMIP5 simulations carried out with the climate system models of Beijing Climate Center. Adv. Clim. Change Res. [in Chinese] 4, 41–49 (2013)
Landrum, L. et al. Last millennium climate and its variability in CCSM4. J. Clim. 26, 1085–1111 (2013)
Schmidt, G. A. et al. Configuration and assessment of the GISS ModelE2 contributions to the CMIP5 archive. J. Adv. Model. Earth Syst . 6, 141–184 (2014)
Schurer, A. P., Hegerl, G. C., Mann, M. E., Tett, S. F. B. & Phipps, S. J. Separating forced from chaotic climate variability over the past millennium. J. Clim. 26, 6954–6973 (2013)
Dufresne, J.-L. et al. Climate change projections using the IPSL-CM5 Earth System Model: from CMIP3 to CMIP5. Clim. Dyn. 40, 2123–2165 (2013)
Giorgetta, M. A. et al. Climate and carbon cycle changes from 1850 to 2100 in MPI-ESM simulations for the coupled model intercomparison project phase 5. J. Adv. Model. Earth Syst . 5, 572–597 (2013)
Sueyoshi, T. et al. Set-up of the PMIP3 paleoclimate experiments conducted using an Earth system model, MIROC-ESM. Geosci. Model Dev . 6, 819–836 (2013)
Schmidt, G. A. et al. Climate forcing reconstructions for use in PMIP simulations of the last millennium (v1.0). Geosci. Model Dev . 4, 33–45 (2011)
Steinhilber, F., Beer, J. & Frohlich, C. Total solar irradiance during the Holocene. Geophys. Res. Lett. 36, L19704 (2009)
Gao, C., Robock, A. & Ammann, C. Volcanic forcing of climate over the past 1500 years: an improved ice core-based index for climate models. J. Geophys. Res. 113, D23111 (2008)
Petit, J.-R. et al. Climate and atmospheric history of the past 420,000 years from the Vostok ice core, Antarctica. Nature 399, 429–436 (1999)
Pearson, K. Notes on regression and inheritance in the case of two parents. Proc. R. Soc. Lond. 58, 240–242 (1895)
Wilks, D. S. Resampling hypothesis tests for autocorrelated fields. J. Clim. 10, 65–82 (1997)
Fisher, R. A. Frequency distribution of the values of the correlation coefficient in samples from an indefinitely large population. Biometrika 10, 507–521 (1915)
Palmer, W. C. Meteorological Drought (US Department of Commerce Research Paper 45, 1965)
Dai, A. G., Trenberth, K. E. & Qian, T. T. A global dataset of Palmer drought severity index for 1870–2002: relationship with soil moisture and effects of surface warming. J. Hydrometeorol. 5, 1117–1130 (2004)
Lamb, H. H. Climate: Present, Past and Future Vols 1 and 2 (Methuen, 1972–1977)
Bradley, R. S. Paleoclimatology: Reconstructing Climates of the Quaternary (Academic, 1999)
Huybers, P. & Curry, W. Links between annual, Milankovitch and continuum temperature variability. Nature 441, 329–332 (2006)
Meko, D. M. Applications of Box-Jenkins methods of time-series analysis to the reconstruction of drought from tree-rings. PhD dissertation, Univ. Arizona (1981)
Guiot, J. The extrapolation of recent climatological series with spectral canonical regression. J. Climatol . 5, 325–335 (1985)
Osborn, T. J. & Briffa, K. R. Revisiting timescale dependent reconstruction of climate from tree-ring chronologies. Dendrochronologia 18, 9–25 (2000)
Franke, J., Frank, D., Raible, C., Esper, J. & Brönnimann, S. Spectral biases in tree-ring climate proxies. Nature Clim. Change 3, 360–364 (2013)
Büntgen, U. et al. Tree-ring amplification of the early nineteenth-century summer cooling in central Europe. J. Clim. 28, 5272–5288 (2015)
Esper, J. et al. Signals and memory in tree-ring width and density data. Dendrochronologia 35, 62–70 (2015)
Zhang, H. et al. Modified climate with long term memory in tree ring proxies. Environ. Res. Lett. 10, 084020 (2015)
Cook, E. R., Briffa, K. R., Meko, D. M., Graybill, D. A. & Funkhouser, G. The ‘segment length curse’ in long tree-ring chronology development for palaeoclimatic studies. Holocene 5, 229–237 (1995)
Esper J., Cook, E. R. & Schweingruber, F. H. Low-frequency signals in long tree-ring chronologies and the reconstruction of past temperature variability. Science 295, 2250–2253 (2002)
Esper, J., Cook, E. R., Krusic, P. J., Peters, K. & Schweingruber, F. H. Tests of the RCS method for preserving low-frequency variability in long tree-ring chronologies. Tree-ring Res. 59, 81–98 (2003)
Schulz, M. & Stattegger, K. SPECTRUM: Spectral analysis of unevenly spaced paleoclimatic time series. Comput. Geosci. 23, 929–945 (1997)
Wessel, P. & Smith, W. H. F. New, improved version of the Generic Mapping Tools released. Eos 79, 579 (1998)
Acknowledgements
Funding for this work was provided in part by the Swedish Research Council (grant number C0592401), and the Navarino Environmental Observatory (NEO) (project number 1946322). E.Z.’s contribution is part of the German Cluster of Excellence CLISAP (grant number EXC177). The publication cost was covered by the Bolin Centre for Climate Research, Stockholm University, and the Department of Physical Geography, Stockholm University. This is a contribution to the Past Global Changes (PAGES) 2k Network. We thank U. Büntgen at the Swiss Federal Research Institute WSL, and H. Grudd at the Swedish Polar Research Secretariat, for comments on the manuscript.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Contributions
F.C.L. and P.J.K. designed the study from an original idea by F.C.L. and P.J.K., with input from H.S.S., E.Z., G.B. and D.F. F.C.L. and P.J.K. collected all the proxy data and H.S.S. screened the records for dating uncertainties. P.J.K. produced the software used for the analyses with input from the co-authors. E.Z. provided the model data and calculated the correlation decay length information. All authors contributed to discussion and interpretation of the results. F.C.L., P.J.K. and D.F. wrote the paper with input from the other co-authors.
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Competing interests
The authors declare no competing financial interests.
Additional information
Data and code is digitally archived at the NOAA Paleoclimatology/World Data Center for Paleoclimatology (https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/study/19725).
Extended data figures and tables
Extended Data Figure 1 Estimated correlation decay length values.
a, The spatial decorrelation function ρ for centennial mean precipitation estimated from the output of the climate model ECHO-G35 over the period 1000–1990, following the procedure described in the Methods for the estimation of the centennial correlation decay length for hydroclimate variability. Distance is the correlation decay length from one point in kilometres. The different colours represent the latitudinal bands. b, An example of the estimated spatial autocorrelation function for centennial mean values of precipitation at latitudes 81.25° N, 80.00° N and 78.75° N, respectively, with the decorrelation length for latitude 80° N indicated in red. c, The simplified CDL function of hydroclimate variability at centennial timescales, derived from panel a, is used throughout the study to calculate the maximum search distances as a function of latitude.
Extended Data Figure 2 The fraction of land area, expressed as decadal means for 1900–1999, exceeding a given wetness or dryness threshold in the gridded reconstruction, model simulations, and instrumental precipitation data.
a, Weighted gridded proxy reconstruction derived from the subset containing only hydroclimate records resolved decadally or better. b, The same as a but for median-model anomaly values of annual precipitation. c, The same as a and b but for the Global Historical Climatology Network 5° × 5° (GHCN5) instrumental annual precipitation data. All decadal average values are standardized over the 1910–1979 period, and model and instrumental values are extracted from grid cells covered by gridded reconstructed values. The red horizontal bars denote the 50% levels.
Extended Data Figure 3 Boxplots showing decadal anomaly values of instrumental data, our gridded reconstruction, drought atlas data, and model simulation of precipitation over the 1900s.
a, Comparison of decadal anomalies between our gridded Northern Hemisphere (NH) hydroclimate reconstruction, the gridded 5 × 5° GHCN5 instrumental annual precipitation anomalies, the six individual model simulations (see Table 1) of annual precipitation and their median. b, Comparison of decadal anomalies between the Monsoon Asia Drought Atlas (MADA)21 and the corresponding domain in our gridded Northern Hemisphere hydroclimate reconstruction, the GHCN5 instrumental annual precipitation data set, and in the six individual model simulations of annual precipitation and their median. c, Comparison of decadal anomalies between the North American Drought Atlas (NADA)20 and the corresponding domain in our gridded Northern Hemisphere hydroclimate reconstruction, the GHCN5 instrumental annual precipitation data set, and in the six individual model simulations of annual precipitation and their median. The oval circles represent the mean, the small blank horizontal bar represents the median, the length of the bars represents the quartile range, and the dark grey dots represent the two standard deviation intervals, whereas the light grey dots represent outliers.
Extended Data Figure 4 Correlations between gridded proxy and model hydroclimate anomalies, and gridded hydroclimate temperature proxy anomalies.
a, Correlations between 45 centennial, lagged 25 years, weighted gridded proxy hydroclimate anomalies and their corresponding median total annual precipitation anomalies from six CMIP5 models, listed in Table 1, over the past twelve centuries. b, The Z-transformed block bootstrap p-values of the correlations shown in panel a. c, Correlations between 45 centennial, lagged 25 years, weighted gridded proxy hydroclimate anomalies and weighted gridded proxy temperature anomalies. d, The Z-transformed block bootstrap p-values of the correlations shown in panel c. Areas shown in grey in b and d have insignificant correlations.
Extended Data Figure 5 Simulated median values of annual precipitation from six atmosphere–ocean coupled general circulation models.
a, Raw, centennial, model anomaly median values calculated and treated and plotted in the same way as the hydrological proxy data. Only values from the same grid cells that are covered by proxy records are extracted (Methods). Anomalies are shown relative to the centennial mean and standard deviation over the eleventh–nineteenth centuries. The colour scale in both panels is truncated at −2 and 2. b Gridded, weighted, values for the same data over land areas with at least three independent grid values within the estimated centennial correlation decay length for centennial-scale hydrological variability.
Extended Data Figure 6 Centennial temperature proxy anomalies updated from ref.15.
a, Gridded, weighted, centennial proxy anomalies values derived from the data listed in Supplementary Table 2 and shown in Fig. 1b. Anomalies are shown relative to the centennial mean and standard deviation over the eleventh–nineteenth centuries. The colour scale is truncated at −2 and 2 and areas with insufficient proxy coverage to compute a gridded weighted mean value are left white. b, Gridded, weighted, centennial anomalies for simulated median values of annual mean temperature from six atmosphere–ocean coupled general circulation models. Only values from the same grid cells that are covered by proxy records are extracted (Methods).
Extended Data Figure 7 Gradients of proxy-reconstructed and simulated Northern Hemisphere centennial hydroclimate anomalies along three meridional transects for the tenth, twentieth and seventeenth centuries.
The tenth and twentieth centuries were the warmest centuries of the past twelve and the seventeenth century was the coldest. a, Smoothed, surfaced, and contoured weighted average centennial proxy anomalies for the tenth century (top right). The trend of the smoothed surfaced anomaly values, with their regression line, is shown along the meridional transects, passing through the densest data clusters (red line, North America; blue line, Europe and Africa; and black line, Asia). b, c, The same as a but depicting centennial proxy anomalies of hydroclimate for the seventeenth and the twentieth centuries, respectively. d–f, The equivalent analysis for the same centennial periods using median-model simulated values, extracted from the same proxy locations, of centennial precipitation anomalies (see Methods).
Extended Data Figure 8 Distribution and density of hydroclimate proxy records.
a, Number of contributing hydrological proxy records included in each proxy-centred anisotropic weighted mean calculation where there are three or more neighbouring proxies found in the search radius. b, Raw, centennial, hydroclimate proxy anomaly values derived from the data listed in Supplementary Table 1 and shown in Fig. 1a. Anomalies are shown relative to the centennial mean and standard deviation over the eleventh–nineteenth centuries. The colour scale is truncated at −2 and 2 and areas with insufficient proxy coverage to compute a gridded weighted mean value are left white.
Extended Data Figure 9 Histograms of cross-correlations with kernel density estimate added.
a, Cross-correlations between gridded hydroclimate proxy data and temperature proxy (PT) data. b, Cross-correlations between gridded hydroclimate model data and temperature model data. c, Cross-correlations between gridded hydroclimate proxy (PH) data and hydroclimate model (MH) data. d, Cross-correlations between gridded temperature proxy data and temperature model (MT) data. e, The same as a but Fisher-transformed. f, The same as b but Fisher-transformed. g, The same as c but Fisher-transformed. h, The same as d but Fisher-transformed. The thin curves in each histogram represent the kernel density estimates.
Supplementary information
Supplementary Information
This file contains Supplementary Tables 1-6 and Supplementary References. (PDF 1466 kb)
Source data
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Ljungqvist, F., Krusic, P., Sundqvist, H. et al. Northern Hemisphere hydroclimate variability over the past twelve centuries. Nature 532, 94–98 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature17418
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nature17418
This article is cited by
-
Features of the Earth’s seasonal hydroclimate: characterizations and comparisons across the Köppen–Geiger climates and across continents
Progress in Earth and Planetary Science (2023)
-
European tree-ring isotopes indicate unusual recent hydroclimate
Communications Earth & Environment (2023)
-
Flood variability in the upper Yangtze River over the last millennium—Insights from a comparison of climate-hydrological model simulated and reconstruction
Science China Earth Sciences (2023)
-
The response of the hydrological cycle to temperature changes in recent and distant climatic history
Progress in Earth and Planetary Science (2022)
-
Modern aridity in the Altai-Sayan mountain range derived from multiple millennial proxies
Scientific Reports (2022)
Comments
By submitting a comment you agree to abide by our Terms and Community Guidelines. If you find something abusive or that does not comply with our terms or guidelines please flag it as inappropriate.