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Mechanisms controlling CO 2 and CH 4 production in wetlands are central to understanding carbon cycling and greenhouse gas exchange. However, the volatility of these respiration products complicates quantifying their rates of production in the field. Attempts to circumvent the challenges through closed system incubations, from which gases cannot escape, have been used to investigate bulk in situ geochemistry. Efforts towards mapping mechanistic linkages between geochemistry and microbiology have raised concern regarding sampling and incubation-induced perturbations. Microorganisms are impacted by oxygen exposure, increased temperatures and accumulation of metabolic products during handling, storage, and incubation. We probed the extent of these perturbations, and their influence on incubation results, using high-resolution geochemical and microbial gene-based community profiling of anaerobically incubated material from three wetland habitats across a permafrost peatland. We compared the original field samples to the material anaerobically incubated over 50 days. Bulk geochemistry and phylum-level microbiota in incubations largely reflected field observations, but divergence between field and incubations occurred in both geochemistry and lineage-level microbial composition when examined at closer resolution. Despite the changes in representative lineages over time, inferred metabolic function with regards to carbon cycling largely reproduced field results suggesting functional consistency. Habitat differences among the source materials remained the largest driver of variation in geochemical and microbial differences among the samples in both incubations and field results. While incubations may have limited usefulness for identifying specific mechanisms, they remain a viable tool for probing bulk-scale questions related to anaerobic C cycling, including CO 2 and CH 4 dynamics. 

Two large volcanic eruptions contributed to extreme cold temperatures during the early 1800s, one of the coldest phases of the Little Ice Age. While impacts from the massive 1815 Tambora eruption in Indonesia are relatively well‐documented, much less is known regarding an unidentified volcanic event around 1809. Here, we describe the spatial extent, duration, and magnitude of cold conditions following this eruption in northwestern North America using a high‐resolution network of tree‐ring records that capture past warm‐season temperature variability. Extreme and persistent cold temperatures were centered around the Gulf of Alaska, the adjacent Wrangell‐St Elias Mountains, and the southern Yukon, while cold anomalies diminished with distance from this core region. This distinct spatial pattern of temperature anomalies suggests that a weak Aleutian Low and conditions similar to a negative phase of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation could have contributed to regional cold extremes after the 1809 eruption.

 

In north-western North America, the so-called divergence problem (DP) is expressed in tree ring width (RW) as an unstable temperature signal in recent decades. Maximum latewood density (MXD), from the same region, shows minimal evidence of DP. While MXD is a superior proxy for summer temperatures, there are very few long MXD records from North America. Latewood blue intensity (LWB) measures similar wood properties as MXD, expresses a similar climate response, is much cheaper to generate and thereby could provide the means to profoundly expand the extant network of temperature sensitive tree-ring (TR) chronologies in North America. In this study, LWB is measured from 17 white spruce sites ( Picea glauca) in south-western Yukon to test whether LWB is immune to the temporal calibration instabilities observed in RW. A number of detrending methodologies are examined. The strongest calibration results for both RW and LWB are consistently returned using age-dependent spline (ADS) detrending within the signal-free (SF) framework. RW data calibrate best with June–July maximum temperatures (Tmax), explaining up to 28% variance, but all models fail validation and residual analysis. In comparison, LWB calibrates strongly (explaining 43–51% of May–August Tmax) and validates well. The reconstruction extends to 1337 CE, but uncertainties increase substantially before the early 17th century because of low replication. RW-, MXD- and LWB-based summer temperature reconstructions from the Gulf of Alaska, the Wrangell Mountains and Northern Alaska display good agreement at multi-decadal and higher frequencies, but the Yukon LWB reconstruction appears potentially limited in its expression of centennial-scale variation. While LWB improves dendroclimatic calibration, future work must focus on suitably preserved sub-fossil material to increase replication prior to 1650 CE. 

The extent to which the eddy statistics of the Martian atmosphere can be inferred from the mean state and highly simplified assumptions about diabatic and frictional processes is investigated using an idealized general circulation model (GCM) with Newtonian relaxation thermal forcing. An iterative technique, adapted from previous terrestrial studies, is used to generate radiative equilibrium temperatures such that the three-dimensional time-mean temperature fields of the idealized model match means computed from the Mars Analysis Correction Data Assimilation (MACDA). Focusing on a period of strong Northern Hemisphere eddy activity prior to winter solstice, it is found that the idealized model reproduces some key features of the spatial patterns of the MACDA eddy temperature variance and kinetic energy fields. The idealized model can also simulate aspects of MACDA’s seasonal cycle of spatial patterns of low-level eddy meridional wind and temperature variances. The most notable weakness of the model is its eddy amplitudes—both their absolute values and seasonal variations are quite unrealistic, for reasons unclear. The idealized model was also run with a mean flow based on output from the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL) full-physics Mars GCM. The idealized model captures the difference in mean flows between MACDA and the GFDL Mars GCM and reproduces a bias in the more complex model’s eddy zonal wavenumber distribution. This implies that the mean flow is an important influence on transient eddy wavenumbers and that improving the GFDL Mars GCM’s mean flow would make its eddy scales more realistic.