Araucaria growth response to solar and climate variability in South Brazil

Abstract

In this work, the Sun–Earth–climate relationship is studied using tree growth rings of Araucaria angustifolia (Bertol.) O. Kuntze collected in the city of Passo Fundo, located in the state of Rio Grande do Sul (RS), Brazil. These samples were previously studied by Rigozo et al. (2008); however, their main interest was to search for the solar periodicities in the tree-ring width mean time series without interpreting the rest of the periodicities found. The question arises as to what are the drivers related to those periodicities. For this reason, the classical method of spectral analysis by iterative regression and wavelet methods are applied to find periodicities and trends present in each tree-ring growth, in Southern Oscillation Index (SOI), and in annual mean temperature anomaly between the 24 and 44° S. In order to address the aforementioned question, this paper discusses the correlation between the growth rate of the tree rings with temperature and SOI. In each tree-ring growth series, periods between 2 and 7 years were found, possibly related to the El Niño/La Niña phenomena, and a ∼ 23-year period was found, which may be related to temperature variation. These novel results might represent the tree-ring growth response to local climate conditions during its lifetime, and to nonlinear coupling between the Sun and the local climate variability responsible to the regional climate variations.