Absent growth rings are rare in Northern Hemisphere forests outside the American Southwest

Background/Question/Methods

Under environmental stress, boreal and temperate trees will occasionally form a discontinuous layer of wood about their stem, a condition described as a locally-absent (or “missing”) growth ring. Absent rings can potentially cause errors in tree-ring dates and dendroclimatic reconstructions but the frequency, distribution and controls of these features are not well understood at large spatial scales. Furthermore, the recent claim that the Northern Hemisphere tree-ring network contains multiple chronological errors caused by widespread but unrecognized locally-absent rings has been difficult to evaluate because it is not known where or when absent rings have occurred across boreal and temperate forests or what environmental factors cause the development of spatially-extensive absent rings. Here we present a synthesis of locally-absent rings across the Northern Hemisphere during the last millennium based on 2,359 publicly-available tree ring-width records.

Results/Conclusions

Over the entire dataset, one locally-absent ring was observed for every 240 visible rings. More than half of all records (1,296 of 2,359) did not contain a single absent ring. Absent rings were extremely uncommon at high latitudes; poleward of 50°N, the absent:visible ratio increased from 1:240 to 1:2,500. Absent rings were not widespread during the growing seasons that followed the four largest stratospheric sulfate aerosol injection events of the last millennium, including A.D. 1259 and the “Year Without a Summer” in A.D. 1816 or during the coldest year in the Northern Hemisphere in the last 1,500 years. Because these features have occurred so rarely in high-latitude and high-elevation tree ring-width records, the argument that paleotemperature estimates based on these data contain chronological errors due to unrecognized absent rings is not consistent with field observations. If however the rate of absent-ring formation were to increase in forests outside of the American Southwest, that behavior would represent a response to environmental stress that is without precedent over the last millennium.