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Climate of Trees
Tue Jun 03, 2003
Listen in RealAudio 
Hi, I'm Bryan Yeaton, and this is The Weather Notebook's weekly segment on Global Climate
Change. Today, Jeff Rice reports how trees can tell the climate record of a thousand
years.
In the simplest terms, the larger the tree ring, the faster the tree grew
and the better the growing conditions were for that year. Those conditions
are usually influenced by rainfall or temperature, so that makes each tree a
type of living weather station.
MH: You know, there's a guy called Bob Dylan had a real good line, you
don't need a weather man to know which way the wind blows... No offense, but
he had something there.
Dr. Malcolm Hughes is a professor at the University of Arizona's world
renowned tree ring lab in Tucson. He says typical weather records only go
back about 100 years.
MH: That's only three 30 year mortgages.
By looking at tree rings Hughes and other researchers can create accurate, year by year
weather records dating back more than a millenium.
MH: For example, we've got a drought going on here for the moment in this
part of the southwest that by some definitions you could say has been going
for four years. It turns out it's not all that unusual. There have been
droughts about this severe two or three times a century for the last
millenium. The good news is that very few of them have gone on longer than
four years. So, for a scientist, it's the extraordinarily unusual situation of being able to
say something comforting.
Hughes says that kind of detailed, year by year information could be of
interest to farmers or other people trying to anticipate regional climate
and weather patterns on a human scale. For The Weather Notebook, I'm Jeff
Rice.
Our series on Global Climate Change has been generously funded by the New England Science
Center Collaborative, and the Roy A. Hunt Foundation. Thanks today to the entire Weather
Notebook staff, Doug Sanborn, Melody Nester, Sean Doucette, and Peter Crane.
Today's Links
The Ultimate Tree Ring Web-pages
http://web.utk.edu/~grissino/
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