Goals

The project will cover the area of southern and central Fennoscandia (up to 64° N) and will consist of four major parts:

(I) analysis of temporal and spatial patterns of precipitation extremes as depicted by instrumental datasets,

(II) dendrochronological reconstruction of past precipitation and droughts, and their independent verification,

(III) joint analysis of reconstructed precipitation and forest fire histories,

and finally

(IV) translating the obtained knowledge into drought and forest fire scenarios with the help of output from general circulation models (GCM).

Three major types of data to be used in this project are

(a) instrumental datasets (1850-present),

(b) tree-ring chronologies (1500-present),

(c) seasonally resolved fire-history chronologies from tree-rings and historical records (~1500-present).