Cool- and warm-season precipitation totals have been reconstructed on a gridded basis for North America using 439 tree-ring chronologies correlated with December–April totals and 547 different chronologies correlated with May–July totals. These discrete seasonal chronologies are not significantly correlated with the alternate season; the December–April reconstructions are skillful over most of the southern and western United States and north-central Mexico, and the May–July estimates have skill over most of the United States, southwestern Canada, and northeastern Mexico. Both the strong continent-wide El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) signal embedded in the cool-season reconstructions and the Arctic Oscillation signal registered by the warm-season estimates faithfully reproduce the sign, intensity, and spatial patterns of these ocean–atmospheric influences on North American precipitation as recorded with instrumental data. The reconstructions are included in the North American Seasonal Precipitation Atlas (NASPA) and provide insight into decadal droughts and pluvials. They indicate that the sixteenth-century megadrought, the most severe and sustained North American drought of the past 500 years, was the combined result of three distinct seasonal droughts, each bearing unique spatial patterns potentially associated with seasonal forcing from ENSO, the Arctic Oscillation, and the Atlantic multidecadal oscillation. Significant 200–500-yr-long trends toward increased precipitation have been detected in the cool- and warm-season reconstructions for eastern North America. These seasonal precipitation changes appear to be part of the positive moisture trend measured in other paleoclimate proxies for the eastern area that began as a result of natural forcing before the industrial revolution and may have recently been enhanced by anthropogenic climate change.

The teleconnection of the El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) to instrumental precipitation and temperature during the cool season over North America is strongest and most temporally stable in the TexMex sector of northern Mexico and the borderlands of southwestern United States. The ENSO impact on North American hydroclimate expands and contracts out of this region on multidecadal timescales, possibly associated with the positive and negative phases of the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation. A subset of tree‐ring chronologies from the TexMex sector also has the strongest and most stable ENSO signal detected in the North American network, similar to the strong ENSO signal measured in instrumental climate data from the same region. This subset of chronologies is used to reconstruct the multivariate ENSO index (MEI) as a measure of ENSO impact on North American hydroclimate during the instrumental and preinstrumental eras. The reconstruction exhibits improved fidelity in the frequency domain and better registration of spatial changes in ENSO signal over North America when compared to an MEI reconstruction based on all ENSO‐correlated tree‐ring chronologies irrespective of temporal stability of correlation. When correlated with gridded instrumental and tree‐ring reconstructed Palmer drought indices across North America, the stable MEI estimate reproduces the changes in spatial impact of ENSO signal measured with instrumental data, and it reveals similar multidecadal changes in prehistory, potentially linked to the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation. The Great Plains drought of the 1850s and 1860s may have been an example of this Pacific‐Atlantic configuration.

A continuous record of 65 987 daily-mean temperature observations since 1828 has been developed for Manhattan, Kansas, by screening and correcting original station records of the U.S. Army Surgeon General, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Signal Service. Hourly, minimum, and maximum temperature observations from seven discontinuous historical stations and four modern stations in Kansas, Missouri, and Oklahoma were used to compile this unbroken record of daily-mean temperature. The historical temperature data were linked with the modern temperature record for Manhattan after these data were adjusted for time of observation differences, station movements, and changes in the environment around the station. The new daily-mean temperature reconstruction for Manhattan now extends with confidence back to 1 July 1855 and with more uncertainty back to 1 July 1828. The uncertainty prior to 1855 is due to instrumentation changes in 1843 and changes in observation practices in 1855 that occurred at many stations. The error estimates reported in this paper do not reflect these potential inhomogeneities and should be considered lower limits. Nonetheless, this new daily record indicates significant warming in all seasons; in heating and cooling degree-days; in the warmest and coldest days of the year; in extremes above the 90th percentile and below the 10th percentile; in the frequency of winter cold waves and summer heat waves; and in the overall annual-mean temperature, which has warmed by 1.57° ± 0.23°C since 1855 (1.27° ± 0.23°C since 1829). The warm Dust Bowl event in the summer of the 1930s and cold winters of the 1870s and 1880s dominate the reconstruction and included some of the warmest and coldest daily extremes, respectively, of the last 154–180 yr. This new reconstruction is currently the longest unbroken daily corrected record in the Americas. These data indicate that the nineteenth century was fundamentally cooler than the twentieth and early twenty-first century.

"The Tree-Ring Drought Atlas Portal: Gridded Drought Reconstructions for the Past 500-2000 Years" published on 15 Jul 2021 by American Meteorological Society.