date: Tue, 2 Mar 1999 12:39:41 -0600 (CST) from: Dave Stahle subject: Re: data for Figures- URGENT to: Keith Briffa Dear Keith: This can hardly be. How can you be lacking for employment? There must be something fundamentally screwed up at East Anglia, if not on the entire island, for you to be in need of funding. Would you consider a permanent move to Arkansas if we could talk our Dean and Chancellor into a so-called opportunity hire? Thats where they take discretionary funds to hire some hot shot scientist that leverages some existing strength at this University. It would be a tenured professorship in geosciences for the nine-month academic year. Then you get grants to support your research and summer salary. Surely you have been offered such positions in the past. I am of course not sure I could persuade them to go for it, but it is a possibility. They just hired a GIS jockey from Boston University in our department through this means, so there is recent precedent. And we are the favored program at the present time. We are now the Dept of Geosciences, geology and geography, and we are cooperating with anthropology to offer a new Ph.D. degree in "environmental dynamics" and our tree-ring lab is an important part in all of this. Are you quite so desperate that you would actually consider such a move?? Ed of course would never let you live it down, but look at his arrangements....he lives on Long Island! I have attached the instrumental and reconstructed winter SOI from our 1998 paper in BAMS; our June PDSI reconstruction for North Carolina (372-1985, in Science 1988); and our regional and statewide reconstruction for three southeastern states (the last 1000 years or so, in BAMS 1992). These attachments are in Mac and PC formats, but they are casewise and include a descriptive header. I hope you can read them. Write back if there are any problems. I just returned from three weeks in Mexico, and we obtained four excellent collections, including Montezuma baldcypress from Chapultepec Park in Mexico City, the garden trees of the Aztec Kings! We have another somewhat more natural cypress collection from Oaxaca, and two Douglas-fir collections, one from Tlaxcala and the other from the mountains just north of Oaxaca city at 17 degrees north, some 1000km farther south than I realized they even existed! It was by far my most successful trip to the tropics yet. The four collections should go 300 to 500 years, or perhaps better, and the cypress look excellent with vivid rings and sensitivity. In Africa, actually Zimbabwe, we now have a Pterocarpus angolensis chronology that is 206 years long, 1792-1997, but it is poorly replicated before 1830. Still, I retain hope that we will eventually be able to improve this chronology. It does have a stong and staightforward climate signal, a direct correlation with wet season rainfall totals. I hope this helps. Please write back if you wish more. I will suggest a caption if you desire, once I know what you want to use. You can also use anything from the captions in the papers. Best of luck, Dave David W. Stahle Professor, Dept. of Geosciences Tree-Ring Laboratory 501 575 3703 Ozark Hall 118 501 575 3846 (fax) University of Arkansas dstahle@comp.uark.edu Fayetteville, AR 72701 http://www.uark.edu/dendro http://www.uark.edu/xtimber