SEASONAL AND ANNUAL TEMPERATURE VARIATIONS SINCE 1470 AD IN EAST CHINA

The ten-year mean anomalies of seasonal and annual temperatures were reconstructed on the basis of historical documents of cold events such as severe snowing and freezing of lakes and rivers.The assorted events were calibrated with instrumental observations of temperature and transformed into ten-year mean anomalies.The reconstructed temperature series show predominance of cold climate in the first four hundred years of the period examined.The centenary seasonal temperature anomalies for the 16th to the 19th century vary between -0.1 and -0.7K.The coldest decades concentrated in the middle of 17th and 19th centuries.It provided the irrefutable evidence of the occurrence of the Little Ice Age in China.The minima of ten-year mean temperature anomalies ranged about -1.5 to 2.0K in spring and winter.Meanwhile,the variance of ten-year mean temperature was increased by more than 20% in comparison to the 20th century.