ABSTRACT
Instrumental and proxy records of climate with annual resolution are concentrated in the developed countries of the temperate zone (Bradley et al 1985; Hughes 1987a). The forests of the Western Himalaya offer a possibility for extending this coverage (Bhattacharya et al 1988). In addition to tree species and sites analogous to those that have yielded valuable dendroclimatic records in semiarid regions there are extensive subalpine conifer forests. These have phytogeographical and ecological similarities to forests in the European Alps (Aymonin and Gupta 1965; Meusel and Schubert 1971) where the power of wood densitome-try as a dendroclimatological technique has been demonstrated (Schweingruber et al 1978).
