1 Spring temperature variability over Turkey since 1800 CE reconstructed 2 from a broad network of tree-ring data 3 4 Nesibe Köse(1),*, H. Tuncay Güner(1), Grant L. Harley(2), Joel Guiot(3) 5 6 (1)Istanbul University, Faculty of Forestry, Forest Botany Department 34473 Bahçeköy-Istanbul, 7 Turkey 8 (2)University of Southern Mississippi, Department of Geography and Geology, 118 College 9 Drive Box 5051, Hattiesburg, Mississippi, 39406, USA 10 (3) Aix-Marseille Université, CNRS, IRD, CEREGE UM34, ECCOREV, 13545 Aix-en- 11 Provence, France 12 13 14 15 16 17 *Corresponding author. Fax: +90 212 226 11 13 18 E-mail address:
[email protected] 19 1 20 Abstract 21 The meteorological observational period in Turkey, which starts ca. 1930 CE, is too short for 22 understanding long-term climatic variability. Tree rings have been used intensively as proxy 23 records to understand summer precipitation history of the region, primarily because of having a 24 dominant precipitation signal. Yet,, the historical context of temperature variability is unclear. 25 Here we used higher order principle components of a network of 23 tree-ring chronologies to 26 provide a high-resolution spring (March–April) temperature reconstruction over Turkey during 27 the period 1800–2002. The reconstruction model accounted for 67% (Adj. R2 = 0.64, p < 0.0001) 28 of the instrumental temperature variance over the full calibration period (1930–2002). The 29 reconstruction is punctuated by a temperature increase during the 20th century; yet extreme cold 30 and warm events during the 19th century seem to eclipse conditions during the 20th century.