Two millennia of Main region (southern Germany) hydroclimate variability

Land, Alexander; Remmele, Sabine; Hofmann, Jutta; Reichle, Daniel; Eppli, Margaret; Zang, Christian; Buras, Allan; Hein, Sebastian; Zimmermann, Reiner

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/cp-15-1677-2019

Articles | Volume 15, issue 5

https://doi.org/10.5194/cp-15-1677-2019

© Author(s) 2019. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/cp-15-1677-2019

© Author(s) 2019. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 15, issue 5

Research article

|

03 Sep 2019

Research article |

| 03 Sep 2019

Two millennia of Main region (southern Germany) hydroclimate variability

Alexander Land, Sabine Remmele, Jutta Hofmann, Daniel Reichle, Margaret Eppli, Christian Zang, Allan Buras, Sebastian Hein, and Reiner Zimmermann

Download

Final revised paper (published on 03 Sep 2019)
Preprint (discussion started on 06 Nov 2018)

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

AC: Author comment | RC: Referee comment | SC: Short comment | EC: Editor comment

- Printer-friendly version

- Supplement

RC1: 'review cp-2018-143', Anonymous Referee #1, 19 Nov 2018
- AC4: 'Final response', Alexander Land, 18 Jan 2019
AC1: 'Response to Referee#1 (RC#1) by Alexander Land on behalf of all Co-Authors', Alexander Land, 21 Nov 2018
RC2: 'Review of cp-2018-143_4', Anonymous Referee #2, 12 Dec 2018
- AC2: 'Comments to Referee #2 by Alexander Land', Alexander Land, 21 Dec 2018
- AC5: 'Final response', Alexander Land, 18 Jan 2019
RC3: 'Review of Land et al. (2018)', Anonymous Referee #3, 15 Dec 2018
- AC3: 'Comments to Referee #3 by Alexander Land', Alexander Land, 21 Dec 2018
- AC6: 'Final response', Alexander Land, 18 Jan 2019

Peer-review completion

AR: Author's response | RR: Referee report | ED: Editor decision

ED: Reconsider after major revisions (04 Feb 2019) by Hans Linderholm

AR by Alexander Land on behalf of the Authors (14 Mar 2019) Author's response

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (01 Apr 2019) by Hans Linderholm

RR by Anonymous Referee #3 (24 Apr 2019)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

This manuscript has been considerably improved since the first version the present reviewer read. The majority, albeit not all, my comments have been addressed. I endorse publication of the revised version of the manuscript – although I still think the authors could be better in placing their study into a wider research context – as the article presents a new two millennia long tree-ring based hydroclimate reconstruction from Europe. It is worth to take note of that, to date, only one such reconstruction exists: the one by Büntgen et al. (2011). So it is a valuable contribution.

I would like to see some additional discussion about why not RCS detrending have been attempted. It was applied – the success of it hard to deem – in Büntgen et al. (2011) on a rather similar material that was hardly less heterogeneous to its nature. Although the present study contributes with valuable new understanding at interannual to decadal scale of past spring to summer hydroclimate variability – especially with regards to extremes – the long-term trends that certainly existed would also have been valuable to capture. Given the short segment length of the material, only RCS detrending can achieve that.

I am delighted to see that the authors are going to make their data freely available. It will be very valuable for future research. However, it would also be good it the authors too despite the data at the International Tree-Ring Data Bank (ITRDB) as it will better safeguard long-term accessibility. Moreover, the actual calibrated reconstruction, with clear caveats regarding the above-mentioned limitations in long-term variability, should be made available at https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/data-access/paleoclimatology-data

Finally, the authors should consider to get their article carefully checked and edited for correct English language use. The present reviewer is not native speaker but it appears clearly that the English language in the article contains numerous errors in grammar, syntax, and general structure. Sometimes there is an unsuitable choice of word for the context too. The Reference list contains errors and mistakes and should be carefully copyedited. I will just prove two examples here (out of many similar ones):

Reference Büntgen et al. (2010a): Stated to be still “In press” despite published 2010 and volume and page number information is missing.

Reference Cook et al. (2015) – special characters missing/wrong: Buntgen should be Büntgen. Cufar should be Čufar. Kose should be Köse. Levanic should be Levanič. Wazny should be Ważny.

Minor comments:
Page 1, line 14: Remove the word “would”.
Page 1, line 15: Remove the word “total”.
Page 1, line 28: Add ~ before 38% and 39%.
Page 2, lines 9–11: Add reference: Cook, E.R., Woodhouse, C.A., Eakin, M., Meko, D.M., Stahle, D.W., 2004. Long-term aridity changes in the western United States. Science 306, 1015–1018. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1102586.
Page 5, line 6: Any web link to where to obtain the DWD records?
Page 18, line 12: Would not a warm spring with moderate rainfall rather increase oak growth? If it is warm and enough soil moisture, I would have guessed that growth conditions would be rather favourable?

Hide

RR by Johannes Edvardsson (24 Jun 2019)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

The manuscript “Two millennia of Main region (southern Germany) hydroclimate variability” (cp-2018-143) present a reconstruction of hydroclimate based on oak total ring-width series from living trees, historic timbers and subfossil alluvial wood deposits from the Main River region in southern Germany. The manuscript is well written, both regarding structure and language. The results, methods and news value presented are not ground breaking, but hydroclimatological studies are in relation to temperature based so limited to numbers that the study is worth publishing after a minor revision.

Remarks
I find it remarkable that the word temperature is only mentioned twice (at line 5 and 6 in the introduction), as I expect temperature, not only precipitation, to be among the factors that influence the total ring width of oak trees in southern Germany. There is some discussion about influence during warm and cold conditions (line 4-10, page 18), but only with the conclusion that the presented reconstruction might be biased, but that it’s unclear to what extent. In papers such as Cufar et al (2014, Trees 28, 1267-1277) they found negative spring-summer temperature signal in oak trees from central Europe. Another example of the importance of temperature might be the Little Ice Age (LIA), which has been considered as cold but dry period in many regions. Even though it was dry moisture sensitive trees in some regions suffered during LIA, maybe as a result of limited evaporation. I therefore suggest a presentation about to what extent both temperature and precipitation influence the tree growth in the result section and a broader discussion if the influence precipitation has on ring width changes during warm versus cold periods.

In the abstract, it’s written that “a reconstruction of hydroclimate with annual to sub-annual resolution covering two millennia for continental Europe” will be presented. However, the word sub-annual is only mentioned once (line 5 in the introduction) in the entire manuscript. It therefore feels that more is promised in abstract than what is presented in the manuscript. Annual to decadal is in better agreement with the reconstructions presented in figure 6.

Please explain the arrows in the figure caption (Fig 5), so that figure and figure caption work independent from the text.

Hide

ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (review by editor) (24 Jun 2019) by Hans Linderholm

AR by Alexander Land on behalf of the Authors (02 Jul 2019) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Publish as is (15 Jul 2019) by Hans Linderholm

Short summary

With the use of precipitation sensitive oak ring-width series from the Main River region (southern Germany) a 2000-year long hydroclimate reconstruction has been developed. The ring series are sensitive to the sum of rainfall from 26 February to 6 July. This region suffered from severe, long-lasting droughts in the past two millennia (e.g., AD 500/510s, 940s, 1170s, 1390s and 1160s). In the AD 550s, 1050s, 1310s and 1480s, multi-year periods with high rainfall hit the region.