Stable carbon isotope ratios of tree-ring cellulose from the site network of the EU-Project ‘ISONET’

The ISONET project has been striving to improve greatly our understanding of European climate systems providing independent quantitative data for model verification and policy making. A network of 24 sites provides dendrochronological coverage from Iberia to Fennoscandia, Caledonia and the Tyrol. The stable isotope (C, H, O) ratios of these annually resolved time series shall be analysed within this project, to reconstruct past climate regimes (temperature, relative humidity and precipitation characteristics) for the last 400 years. Climate variability shall be addressed on three timescales; decade-century (source water/air mass dominance); inter-annual (quantifying baseline variability, extreme events and recent trends); and intra-annual (high resolution exploration of seasonality signals within tree-rings). ISONET goes far beyond existing tree-ring analyses in its spatial based investigation and interpretation (see also https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/EVK2-CT-2002-00147).