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Abstract Mean daily to monthly precipitation averages peak in late July over eastern Colorado and some of the most damaging Front Range flash floods have occurred because of extreme 1-day rainfall events during this period. Tree-ring chronologies of adjusted latewood width in ponderosa pine from eastern Colorado are highly correlated with the highest 1-day rainfall totals occurring during this 2-week precipitation maximum in late July. A regional average of four adjusted latewood chronologies from eastern Colorado was used to reconstruct the single wettest day observed during the last two weeks of July. The regional chronology was calibrated with the CPC 0.25° × 0.25° Daily U.S. Unified Gauge-Based Analysis of Precipitation dataset and explains 65% of the variance in the highest 1-day late July precipitation totals in the instrumental data from 1948 to 1997. The reconstruction and instrumental data extend fully from 1779 to 2019 and indicate that the frequency of 1-day rainfall extremes in late July has increased since the late eighteenth century. The largest instrumental and reconstructed 1-day precipitation extremes are most commonly associated with the intrusion of a major frontal system into a deep layer of atmospheric moisture across eastern Colorado. These general synoptic conditions have been previously linked to extreme localized rainfall totals and widespread thunderstorm activity over Colorado during the summer season. Chronologies of adjusted latewood width in semiarid eastern Colorado constitute a proxy of weather time-scale rainfall events useful for investigations of long-term variability and for framing natural and potential anthropogenic forcing of precipitation extremes during this 2-week precipitation maximum in a long historical perspective.
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Dynamics, Variability, and Change in Seasonal Precipitation Reconstructions for North America
Cool- and warm-season precipitation totals have been reconstructed on a gridded basis for North America using 439 tree-ring chronologies correlated with December–April totals and 547 different chronologies correlated with May–July totals. These discrete seasonal chronologies are not significantly correlated with the alternate season; the December–April reconstructions are skillful over most of the southern and western United States and north-central Mexico, and the May–July estimates have skill over most of the United States, southwestern Canada, and northeastern Mexico. Both the strong continent-wide El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) signal embedded in the cool-season reconstructions and the Arctic Oscillation signal registered by the warm-season estimates faithfully reproduce the sign, intensity, and spatial patterns of these ocean–atmospheric influences on North American precipitation as recorded with instrumental data. The reconstructions are included in the North American Seasonal Precipitation Atlas (NASPA) and provide insight into decadal droughts and pluvials. They indicate that the sixteenth-century megadrought, the most severe and sustained North American drought of the past 500 years, was the combined result of three distinct seasonal droughts, each bearing unique spatial patterns potentially associated with seasonal forcing from ENSO, the Arctic Oscillation, and the Atlantic multidecadal oscillation. Significant 200–500-yr-long trends toward increased precipitation have been detected in the cool- and warm-season reconstructions for eastern North America. These seasonal precipitation changes appear to be part of the positive moisture trend measured in other paleoclimate proxies for the eastern area that began as a result of natural forcing before the industrial revolution and may have recently been enhanced by anthropogenic climate change.
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- PAR ID:
- 10139869
- Publisher / Repository:
- American Meteorological Society
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Journal of Climate
- Volume:
- 33
- Issue:
- 8
- ISSN:
- 0894-8755
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- p. 3173-3195
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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