Seasonal Reconstruction of Summer Precipitation Variability and Dating of Flood Events for the Millennium Between 3250 and 2250 Years BC for the Main Region, Southern Germany - Integrated Analysis of Interglacial Climate Dynamics (INTERDYNAMIC) - page 121

Seasonal Reconstruction of Summer
Precipitation Variability and Dating
of Flood Events for the Millennium
Between 3250 and 2250 Years BC
for the Main Region, Southern Germany

Johannes Schoenbein, Alexander Land, Michael Friedrich,
R diger Glaser and Manfred Kueppers

ü

Abstract We present a millennial-long reconstruction of summer precipitation
variability for the Main region (MR) in southern Germany (3250 BC to 2250 BC)
based on subfossil-oak, tree-ring data. Wood-anatomical ood markers have been

identi flood events providing additional information of

hydro-climatic dynamics. Reconstructed precipitation variability and

ed and used for dating

ood occur-
rence show a noticeable shift which coincides with a decrease in replication
(number of trees) of the Holocene Oak Chronology (HOC) Hohenheim around
2750 BC. The reconstruction is based on a linear climate-growth model derived
from total ring width (TRW) data from living oak trees from the MR using the past
approximately 130 years as a basis. The best response was identi ed for the pre-

cipitation sum between April 1st and July 10th providing an r 2 = 0.31.

Keywords Tree rings Southern Germany Holocene Oak Chronology (HOC)

Hohenheim Precipitation variability Flood frequency

1 Introduction

Studies on hydro-climatic variability had been secondary to those studying past
temperature variability (Wilson et al. 2013 ). However ambitious efforts were
undertaken to reconstruct past hydro-climatic conditions (e.g. Buentgen et al. 2011 ;
Drobyshev et al. 2011 ; Wilson et al. 2013 ). Derived from the original idea to
combine the Holocene Oak Chronology (HOC) with documentary data to provide