Estimating Long-Term Statistics for Annual Precipitation for Six Regions of the United States from Tree-Ring Data

Abstract

Spatial anomalies of seasonal precipitation for the United States and southwestern Canada have been reconstructed from 1602 through 1961 using dendrochronologicai and multivariate techniques on 65 arid-site tree-ring chronologies from western North America. Seasonal reconstructions are averaged to obtain mean annual precipitation values for six regions of importance to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) Nuclear Waste Management Program (NWMP). Statistics calculated from the regionally averaged annual values for 25-year and longer intervals show annual precipitation in the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries to be lower than in the twentieth century for three regions in the American Southwest and higher for one region in the Northwest and two regions in the East. The variability of precipitation generally was higher in the past three centuries than in the present century. Twenty-five-year intervals with noteworthy statistics are identified and important results are summarized and tabulated for use in the hydrologic modeling of the NWMP. Additional research is recommended to incorporate temperature and precipitation into a single hydrologic parameter.