date: Thu Apr 24 15:42:36 2003 from: Keith Briffa subject: Re: Can you provide a brief comment if not full review? to: Keith Alverson Keith Sorry , I do have a recollection of quickly skimming this paper before and rapidly dumping it on a pile labelled "probably not worth the effort of giving a thorough review". Basically , I think the paper has little if anything to recommend publication. It adds little , except confusion , to the science. The main problem is a lack of focus and clear experimental design. The reducing sensitivity of tree growth to temperature forcing is unarguably a difficult and complex problem because the phenomenon is largely dependent on what trees/areas/variables/processing methods are used to make the comparison with "temperature". The temperature variable is itself a potentially ill-defined ( compromise in effect) choice . Briffa et al have published a specific manifestation of this phenomenon - based on one highly selective set of data , for which they describe the local and regional associations with one optimum "summer average " for density data and another for ring width. The present paper , by not adequately defining the rules upon which they based their regionalisation of the tree-ring data or the basis for specifying a particular temperature season(s) to be used in the comparisons , serves to confuse a number of potential factors that contribute to the possible time-dependence in the correlations they describe. The overriding criticism is that they examine the regional tree ring series correlations with only the one ( Northern Hemisphere annual mean ) temperature series. It is therefore not possible to know to what extent the results represent a shift in the association between that Hemisphere mean series and the regional climates of the areas represented by their regional chronologies. There are other problems (such as time-dependent changes in the structure of these chronologies, non-comparability in the simple correlations because of the different lengths of period - it would be better to calculate significance levels over a moving window compatible in lengh to the short recent period(s) and test whether the reduced values are significant in the context of the longer records uncertainty estimates ) . Work has been published that documents how temperatures averaged over different areas of the Hemisphere correlate with the Northern Hemisphere mean and the associations are subtlety time dependent and time-scale dependent and seasonally dependent . The association between Northern Sweden and The Hemisphere in summer is especially weak and one would not presumably base a reconstruction of the latter on only one Tornetresk series anyway as shown in 4. The paper does not offer much because it needs to be very much reworked after considerable work - and the conclusions are pretty much hand waving anyway. I do not know whether this is sufficient but it does give my "overall" opinion. cheers Keith At 02:24 PM 4/23/03 +0200, you wrote: Hi Keith, I hope you have recovered from your back surgery well. I am writing with regard to the sonenchkin paper submitted for a special issue of paleo3 that Olga Solomina and I are editing that I sent you asking for a review some time ago. The timeline for the issue is rapidly drawing to a close so I absolutely must send this back to the author with his reviews before the end of April. The paper deals with the recent decoupling of temperature and tree ring indicese in high latitude eurasia that you have pointed out in previous publications, so I feel it is rather key to have your thoughts. The other reviewer has provided a very thorough set of suggestions, so I don't really need a thorough review, but I would very much appreciate it if you could have a quick read of the paper and let me know your general thoughts, in particular if there are any glaring errors in it! If you cannot find the time, please also let me know so I can find another option. Thanks in advance. Keith on 02/18/2003 11:56 AM, Keith Briffa,cru (Climatic Research Unit) at K.Briffa@uea.ac.uk wrote: > Unfortunately, I am forced to be away from the office for some weeks at least > during February and early March, having surgery on my back and undertaking a > period of recuperation. If you are contacting me regarding outstanding review > requests or queries regarding the status of manuscripts submitted to The > Holocene, please note that I am dealing with these during my absence and I > will contact you directly. If your request is of a different nature, I will > try to respond in due course, but you may prefer to try one of my colleagues > (see below). > > > > Questions with regard to our current research proposals should be directed to: > > > > Tim Osborn (t.osborn@uea.ac.uk) - SOAP or RAPID; > > Phil Jones (p.jones@uea.ac.uk) - HOLSMEER, ALP﷓IMP. > > > > Keith Briffa > > 29/1/03 > -- Keith Alverson Executive Director PAGES International Project Office Bärenplatz 2, 3011 Bern, Switzerland [1]http://www.pages-igbp.org email: alverson@pages.unibe.ch Tel (office): +41 31 312 31 33 Tel (direct): +41 31 312 31 54 Mobile: (+41) 079 641 9220 Fax: +41 31 312 31 68 -- Professor Keith Briffa, Climatic Research Unit University of East Anglia Norwich, NR4 7TJ, U.K. Phone: +44-1603-593909 Fax: +44-1603-507784 [2]http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/people/briffa[3]/