Dendrochronology in European Russia in the Early 21st Century: State of the Art

In this review, we have focused on the following key points: (1) living trees in European Russia and their climatic sensitivity. Species suitable for tree-ring analyses, their age limits, spatial distribution of temperature- and drought-sensitive trees, and the available tree-ring chronologies. (2) Extension of the living-tree chronologies using archeological and architectural samples. Dendrochronological dating of archeological and cultural monuments. (3) Tree-ring-based climatic reconstructions in European Russia. European Russia drought atlas. (4) Climatic and environmental reconstructions in the Northern Caucasus. (5) Dendroecology. We also briefly summarized the problems and prospects of tree-ring research in European Russia.

Distributed summer air temperatures across mountain glaciers: climatic sensitivity and glacier size

Near-surface air temperature (Ta) is highly important for modelling glacier ablation, though its spatio-temporal variability over melting glaciers still remains largely unknown. We present a new dataset of distributed Ta for three glaciers of different size in the south-east Tibetan Plateau during two monsoon-dominated summer seasons. We compare on-glacier Ta to ambient Ta extrapolated from several, local off-glacier stations. We parameterise the along-flowline climatic sensitivity of Ta on these glaciers to changes in off-glacier temperatures and present the results in the context of several available distributed on-glacier datasets around the world. Climatic sensitivity decreases rapidly up to 2000–3000 m along the down-glacier flowline distance. Beyond this distance, both the Ta of the Tibetan glaciers and global glacier datasets show a slower decrease of climatic sensitivity. In general, observations on small glaciers (with