Abstract. A ring-width series was used as a proxy to reconstruct the past 413-year record of April-July minimum temperature at Laobai Mountain, northeastern China. Chronology was built using standard tree-ring procedures for providing comparable information in this area while preserving low-frequency signals. By analyzing the relationship between the tree-ring chronology of the Korean pine (Pinus koraiensis) and meteorological data, we found that the standard chronology was significantly correlated with the April-July minimum temperature (r = 0.76). Therefore, the April-July minimum temperature since 1600 was reconstructed by this tree-ring series. The reconstruction equation accounted for 57.3 % of temperature variation, and it proved reliable by testing with several methods (e.g., sign test, product mean test, reduction of error, and coefficient error). Reconstructed April-July minimum temperature in Laobai Mountains showed five cool periods (1605–1681, 1684–1690, 1747–1756, 1914–1922, and 1953–1966) and eight warm periods (1697–1704, 1767–1785, 1787–1793, 1795–1801, 1803–1808, 1816–1826, 1835–1878, and 1987–2008) during the past 413 years. The reconstructed low temperature periods in the 17th and early 18th century were consistent with the Little Ice Age in the Northern Hemisphere, and the rate of warming in the 19th century was significantly slower than that in late 20th century. In addition, the reconstructed series was fairly consistent with the historical and natural disaster records of extreme climate events (e.g., cold damage and frost disaster) in this area, and it exhibited 128-60-, 23-22-, 12-10-, 4.0-2.7-, and 2.4-year periods of warm-cool changes, which may be related to variations in sunspot activity or other large-scale interactions between the ocean and the atmosphere.
A 414-year tree-ring-based April–July minimum temperature reconstruction and
its implications for the extreme climate events, northeast China