Climatic variations in the East European plain during the last millennium: State of the art

Abstract

High resolution last millennium reconstructions of annual, summer, winter temperature and sum of annual precipitation for the East European Plain based on the historical data, palynology, tree-ring analyses, borehole temperature measurements and lake sediments are discussed. The first multiproxy quantitative reconstruction of these parameters takes into account mostly historical and palynological records of suffice length and quality. It shows the negative linear trends in air temperature in the last millennium, while in the twentieth century these trends abruptly changed to the positive ones in annual and winter temperature. No sign of summer warming in the twentieth century in the East European Plain is evident either from instrumental records or from proxy-based reconstructions. The results of the annual temperature reconstruction in the East European Plain are compared with the high resolution temperature reconstructions of the Northern Hemisphere. No millennium-long trend in annual precipitation in the East European Plain is identified in the multi-proxy reconstruction. Potential sources of errors, biases, and disagreement in different kinds of records are discussed. © Springer Science + Business Media B.V. 2010.