A Ring-Width Chronology from the Southern Slopes of the Qilian Mountains of China: A Long-Term Context (255–2018 CE) for Rapid Warming over the Northeastern Tibetan Plateau

To better understand the temporal and spatial characteristics of climate change over the past 2000 years, reliable, high-resolution paleoclimatic proxies are required. In this study, we established a 1919 year-long ringwidth chronology using Juniperus przewalskii from the southern slopes of the Qilian Mountains on the Tibetan Plateau. This chronology was used to reconstruct annual minimum temperature variations from September to August. The reconstruction model explains 57.3% of the temperature variations during the calibration period (1960-2018 CE). The reconstructed temperature series reveals many clear multidecadal fluctuations, with the past 50 years being the warmest since 255 CE. Additionally, we compared our reconstruction with others from Eurasia and found that all records show greater temperature consistency during cold events on annual to multidecadal scales compared to warm events, with cold events apparently linked to volcanic activity.