HR: 1330h
AN: PP23B-05    [Abstracts]
TI: Tree Rings as Climate Proxies in Susquehanna River Basin Streamflow
AU: * Hutcherson, M L
EM: mlhutche@uno.edu
AF: University of New Orleans, Department of Geology and Geophysics, 2000 Lakeshore Drive, New Orleans, LA 70148 United States
AU: Jenkins, G S
EM: gjenkins@howard.edu
AF: Howard University Program in Atmospheric Science, Department of Physics and Astronomy, oom 105 Thirkield Bldg., 2355 Sixth Street, NW, Washington, DC 20059 United States
AU: Najjar, R
EM: najjar@meteo.psu.edu
AF: The Pennsylvania State University, Department of Meteorology, 503 Walker Bldg, University Park, PA 16802-5013 United States
AB: Tree rings have been used throughout the world to reconstruct past climate records. However, no attempt has been made to reconstruct streamflow records for the Susquehanna River Basin. Having previously found a statistical relationship between tree rings and streamflow records in the basin, the researchers have refined this relationship and used it to reconstruct streamflow in the basin back to 1700. Tree ring chronologies were obtained from NOAA's Paleoclimatic International Tree Ring Data Bank for the period 1700 to 1981. Streamflow records were obtained from the USGS website for Harrisburg, PA for the period 1891 - 1981. Six tree ring sites (Figure 1) were used to determine the significance using time series and regression analyses. The highest significance was found among the r-values for tree ring located in Salt Springs Park (.587) and from the combination of all six sites (.584). The tree ring sites were lagged so that the streamflow of year 1 produced the tree rings of year 2. Figure 3 shows the correlation between Salt Springs and Harrisburg streamflow using z-scores as the time series. Figure 4 gives the calibration period of the streamflow data. Figure 5 gives the actual reconstruction of the streamflow records. On the graph there are major peaks and valleys indicating major historical events such as floods and droughts. There is also some decadal variability indicated. The reconstructed data for the 1800s indicates that significant trends were occurring throughout the century.
DE: 1860 Runoff and streamflow
DE: 3344 Paleoclimatology
SC: Paleoceanography and Paleoclimatology [PP]
MN: 2005 Joint Assembly