Warm season temperature reconstruction in North China based on the tree-ring blue intensity of Picea meyeri

In the past 30 years, observational climate datasets reveal a significant a drying and warming trend over in North China. Understanding of climatic variability over North China and its driving mechanism in a long-term perspective is, however, limited to a few sites only, especially the lack of temperature reconstructions based on latewood density and blue intensity. In this study, we developed a 281-year latewood blue intensity chronology based on 45 cores of Picea meyeri in western North China. Based on the discovery that the warm season (May–August) mean maximum temperature is the main controlling factor affecting the change in blue light reflection intensity, we established a regression model that explained 37% of the variance during the calibration period (1950–2020), allowing to trace the mean maximum temperature up to 1760 CE. From the past 261 years, we identified seven persistent high temperature periods (1760–1773, 1778–1796, 1805–1814, 1869–1880, 1889–1934, 1984–2000, 2004–2020) and three persistent low temperature periods (1815–1868, 1935–1963, 1969–1983) in North China. Comparisons of a nearby temperature reconstructions and climate gridded data indicate that our reconstruction record a wide range of temperature variations in North China. The analysis of links between large-scale climatic variation and the temperature reconstruction showed that there is a relationship between extremes in the warm season temperature and anomalous SSTs in the equatorial eastern Pacific, and implied that the extremes in the warm season temperature in North China will be intensified under future global warming.