Medieval Drought in the Upper Colorado River Basin David M
BAK673 GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS, VOL. 34, L10705, doi:10.1029/2007GL029988, 2007 Click Here for Full Article Medieval drought in the upper Colorado River Basin David M. Meko,1 Connie A. Woodhouse,2 Christopher A. Baisan,1 Troy Knight,1 Jeffrey J. Lukas,3 Malcolm K. Hughes,1 and Matthew W. Salzer1 Received 14 March 2007; revised 11 April 2007; accepted 17 April 2007; published 24 May 2007. [1] New tree-ring records of ring-width from remnant Mono Lake low stands, submitted to Holocene, 2006, preserved wood are analyzed to extend the record of hereinafter referred to as Graham and Hughes, submitted reconstructed annual flows of the Colorado River at Lee manuscript, 2006). In this paper we attempt to quantify Ferry into the Medieval Climate Anomaly, when epic MCA drought magnitude in the UCRB by analysis of a droughts are hypothesized from other paleoclimatic newly developed network of tree-ring sites located within evidence to have affected various parts of western North the basin. Annual flow of the Colorado River at Lee Ferry, America. The most extreme low-frequency feature of the Arizona, is reconstructed to A.D. 762 with ring-width using new reconstruction, covering A.D. 762-2005, is a tree-ring samples from living trees, augmented by samples hydrologic drought in the mid-1100s. The drought is from logs and dead standing trees (remnant wood). We characterized by a decrease of more than 15% in mean identify multi-decadal UCRB droughts of the MCA, quan- annual flow averaged over 25 years, and by the absence of tify the year-by-year sequence of flow anomalies in the most high annual flows over a longer period of about six decades.
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