date: Fri Mar 21 13:01:21 1997 from: Keith Briffa subject: Re: Recent Results of EC's Climate Research to: Marina.VEREERTBRUGGHEN@DG12.cec.be At 17:41 20/03/97 +0100, you wrote: >Dear Dr. Briffa, > >Thanks for your fax of today and the enclosures. I would appreciate very much if you yourself could send me a text of a few lines concerning the important results, which could be incorporated in the above mentioned document. > >Yours sincerely, > >Anver GHAZI > Dear Anver, Please see below a suggested piece of text that could be included in Section 1.4 (Past Climates), probably directly following "..disentangle human-induced changes from the natural variability." ADVANCE-10K (Analysis of Dendrochronological Variability and Associated Climates in Eurasia : the last 10,000 years) is drawing together existing tree-ring data at high and middle latitudes and developing a new network of densitometric tree-ring chronologies across northern Fennoscandia and Russia. Detailed year-by-year maps of summer temperatures have been produced over hundreds of years and long reconstructions at several sites with subfossil wood remains, extend back over millennia. These data provide unique insight into high-resolution and longer timescales of past climate variability. They show the influence of large volcanic eruptions. They also suggest that tree growth rates have progressively increased over the last two centuries but this trend reversed abruptly and dramatically several decades ago - both phenomena likely being associated with different anthropogenic influences, as yet unproven. I hope this is of some use. I envisage that the papers describing the results alluded to above will cause quite a stir when they are produced . We hope to get these done and submitted over the next few months (EC reports permitting!). with very best wishes Keith