DENDROCLIMATOLOGY IN THE NEAR EAST

 Ünal Akkemik

Istanbul University, Faculty of Forestry, Dept. of Forest Botany, 34473, Bahçeköy-Istanbul, Turkey;  E-mail: uakkemik@istanbul.edu.tr

In the Near East relatively few dendroclimatological studies have been developed. Most of these studies were performed for Turkey, and a couple of them were for its neighbors. Dendroclimatology has an extremely importance for the region, because of (1) having very short recorded climate data, and (2) having a drought problem.

The first precipitation reconstruction was developed by Touchan et al (1999) in the region, and then, has been continued (D’Arrigo and Cullen, 2001; Touchan et al, 2003, 2005a-b, 2007; Akkemik and Aras, 2005; Akkemik et al, 2005, 2008; Köse et al, 2007). Meanwhile, many dating studies were performed by Kuniholm and his team in the region (1990, 1996), and was built a very long master chronology for East Aegean Basin.

In dendroclimatological studies the most important things are to take samples from the appropriate sites, and to use appropriate measuring, crossdating and statistical methods. In the region, dendroclimatological studies showed that trees in the sampled sites on south slopes and shallow soils respond to mainly spring-summer precipitation.  May-June precipitation is the most important period, which affects tree-ring widths in Turkey. This time interval is also very important because of being wheat growing time in agriculture.

According to the results of the present studies, durations of the dry years are mainly one year, sometimes two years and rarely three years. Only one long-term dry event with five-year duration (1475-1479) was found in the Eastern Mediterranean Basin. According to the Köse (2007)’s field reconstructions for the years 1786-2000, the years, 1790, 1794, 1819, 1830, 1840,  1851-1852, 1867-1868, 1887, 1893-1894, 1909, 1916, 1927-1928 were dry for the western Anatolia;  on the contrary, 1788, 1795, 1827, 1835, 1846, 1848, 1855, 1876, 1881, 1885, 1901 and 1919 were wet. In the last study (Akkemik et al, 2008), the first streamflow reconstruction was performed. In the last 350 years of the streamflow of Filyos River, one long-term dry period was clearly observed during 1887-1995. This time period had many extreme dry years, 1887, 1890-1891, 1893-1894. All these dry years were also indicated by the historical records as famine years.

Our future perspectives are to continue to develop precipitation and streamflow reconstructions for the entire region and complete field reconstructions. Also our dendro- team was focused on spectral and wavelength analysis whether there is a periodicity in drought.

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