Yellowstone National Park is famous for harsh winters but a new study shows summers are also getting harsher, with August 2016 ranking as one of the hottest summers in the last 1,250 years.
Yellowstone National Park is famous for harsh winters but a new study shows summers are also getting harsher, with August 2016 ranking as one of the hottest summers in the last 1,250 years.
The new study drew upon samples of living and dead Engelmann spruce trees collected at high elevations in and around Yellowstone National Park to extend the record of maximum summer temperatures back centuries beyond instrumental records. The findings were published in Geophysical Research Letters, AGU’s journal for high-impact, short-format reports with immediate implications spanning all Earth and space sciences.
The team, led by Karen Heeter, a dendrochronologist at the University of Idaho in Moscow, found that the 20th and 21st centuries, and especially the past 20 years, are the hottest in the new 1,250-year record. Previously, temperature records for the Yellowstone region were only available going back to 1905.
The climate data gleaned from the tree ring samples fits closely with the instrumental record over the past 100 years. The team was also able to identify several known periods of warming in the tree ring record, including the Medieval Climate Anomaly that occurred between 950 and 1250, as well as several multidecadal periods of cooling that occurred prior to 1500.
Read more at American Geophysical Union
Photo Credit: ArtTower via Pixabay
