An Attempt of Combining Oak and Pine Trees to Enhance Monsoonal Precipitation Reconstruction in the East Qinling Mountains

Abstract

Short‐term meteorological observations often limit our understanding of regional climate change over historical periods. Dendroclimatology provides an effective means for overcoming this limitation by extending the climate record. In China, most tree‐ring studies focus on coniferous species. But this study innovatively combines both Liaodong oak and Chinese pine trees to establish a new synthesis chronology in the East Qinling Mountains. The new synthesis chronology showed a significantly high correlation with observed April–June precipitation ( r = 0.747, n = 41, p R 2 > 40%). Using this synthesis chronology, we reconstructed a 163‐year precipitation series that offers a robust spatiotemporal representation of the marginal East Asian Summer Monsoon (EASM) region through spatial correlation analysis and comparison with surrounding hydroclimate reconstructions. The several extreme drought periods (1871–1881, 1917–1931, and 1957–1973) and extreme wet periods (1888–1899, 1906–1916, and 1985–1995) were detected from the reconstruction. Additionally, it showed significant synchronisation with the EASM indices ( p

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