Coherence of climatic reconstruction from historical documents in China by different studies

Much effort has been spent in the last few decades to reconstruct the climate over China using a variety of historical documents. However, differences in the results of reconstructions exist even when people are using similar documents. In order to address this issue, 14 published temperature series by different studies were analyzed for coherence and mutual consistency. The analyses on their temporal fluctuations indicate that for the individual time series (standardized) on the 10-years time scales, 57 of the 91 correlation coefficients reach the significance level of 99%. The spatial patterns among the different time series also show high coherency. In addition, consistency also exhibit when comparing the reconstructions with other available natural climate change indicators. Above information was subsequently used to synthesize the temperature series for the last 500 and 1000 years. Copyright (C) 2007 Royal Meteorological Society.