The tracks of my floods: tree-ring memoirs of an Arctic river

The shortness of gaged river flows limits our understanding of the variability of the river component of heat and fresh water inflow to the Arctic Ocean. This talk describes a tree-ring approach to addressing the uncertainty of Arctic river flows using a combination of non-riparian and riparian  trees growing in the floodplain of the lower Ob River, in western Siberia. The talk focuses specifically on the tree-ring signal for inter-annual variability of flooding, which happens on a massive spatial scale each year along the Ob with spring ice break. Results using tree-ring samples collected over the past several years by a collaboration of Russian and USA tree-ring researchers shows a species-dependent mix of positive and negative responses of tree-ring width to flooding. The talk addresses modeling approaches to signal identification and to reconstruction of high flows on the Ob, and extension to a more extensive research project now starting on the adjacent Yenisei River Basin.