English Tree Ring - Temperature Graphs
As The Englishman I was interested in what the hacked files said about England
...\FOIA\documents\briffa-treering-external\belfast\masters\england.dat is described as:
DMB 19 SITE MEAN MASTER 404AD TO 1981AD
Modern European Ring Width Masters as supplied by Dave Brown, March 95
Graphed out the figures look like this:
(If the right hand side of the graph is cut off click here
Do they relate to temperature?
I don't know but let's compare them to the Central England Temperature record from 1660 to 1981 (It's a pity that is the last date of the tree rings..)
Squinting at them, which is the poor man's multivariate analysis, they sort of do.
Now look back at the longer graph. Looks a bit "warmer" maybe back in the middle ages.
Of course I don't know anything more about the tree rings than the description above so I may be barking up the wrong tree. But I thought it interesting and it didn't cost the taxpayer anything to produce the graph, and only took me ten minutes...
Comments
It would be helpful if the charts weren't chopped off at about 1535 on the right hand edge.
WV: harry
Posted by: Mark Wadsworth | November 20, 2009 11:45 PM
The charts show up now, thanks, but my next problem is that the vertical axes aren't actually labelled.
WV: the joke is wearing thin. Harry.
(TE - the tree ring widths have no given units, and the temperature is x10 as labelled (deg C as not labelled)
And the WV is constant and has been unchanged for years - it makes it easier for regular commentators.)
Posted by: Mark Wadsworth | November 21, 2009 1:25 AM
They don't appear to correlate to me, a lot of the troughs on one match with peaks on the other.
Posted by: DocBud | November 21, 2009 2:32 PM
Thanks, so if the red line is at 100, that means average temp 10 deg C, thanks. As Doc Bud says, there's no particular correlation, and the temperature line seems pretty flat apart from a nasty cold snap at the end of the 17th C.
PS, my "Harry" joke was perhaps a bit obscure. It's just traditional elsewhere to inlcude the WV in one's comment if the word is particularly amusing or relevant to the post. So I cheer myself up by typing in the WV even on 'blogs where it never changes.
Posted by: Mark Wadsworth | November 21, 2009 7:31 PM
Squinting and tilting my head on one side does mean I can see a vague correlation, but I have to say that in my opinion it's not close enough to make a decent model out of - certainly not the sort of model I'd use to try and motivate a multi-billion pound investment decision, anyway.
Posted by: The Remittance Man | November 23, 2009 6:07 AM