ABSTRACT
Annual temperature departures for the period from 1601–1974 are reconstructed for northern North America for the general region of subarctic and arctic Canada and Alaska based on tree-ring data. Tree-ring information from the North American boreal forest zone can extend the temperature record for this region back to about A.D. 1600 with reliability. Prior to this time the data set is not adequate for large-scale coverage. There are well over 100 chronologies from sites in these northern regions from various sources (Cropper and Fritts 1981; Jacoby and Ulan 1981; Jacoby 1982). However, most of them are either short in length, end in the 1960s or earlier, or are poorly replicated. Some chronologies lack a low-frequency climatic signal due to complex forest-stand dynamics or site ecology, and some have had this signal removed by standardization methods. The reconstruction herein is therefore based on a limited number of recent ring-width chronologies that provide good spatial distribution and low and high-frequency climatic information. Long-term trends in this reconstruction are compared to other proxy and historical climatic data for the region.
