A July-August relative humidity record in North China since 1765 AD reconstructed from tree-ring cellulose δ¹⁸O

Since the late 1970s, East Asian summer monsoon (EASM) has shown a significant weakening trend, and sustained drought has occurred across North China. Placing recent climate changes in the paleoclimatic context can better understand the EASM variations. Four δ¹⁸O sequences based on tree-ring cellulose of Chinese pine were developed from Mt. Beiwudang, North China, covering a period from 1700 to 2013. Based on a climatic response analysis, a transfer function was designed to reconstruct the relative humidity from July to August (RH_JA hereafter). The RH_JA spans from 1765 to 2013 and explains 49% (R²_adj = 48%) of the instrumental variance during the calibration period (1961-2013, r = - 0.70, p < 0.0001). The RH_JA is mainly influenced by precipitation in the summer rainy season and reflect EASM variations. Spatial representation analysis indicates that RH_JA represents the dry/wet variations across North China. At the interannual scale, RH_JA records many extreme dry/wet events, among which the events in 1876-1878, 1900, and the 1920s are extensive droughts. Those events correspond well to ENSO events, plus further correlation and periodicity analysis indicate that RH_JA contains ENSO signals. At the interdecadal scale, RH_JA shows a decreasing trend and unprecedented low values from 1981 to 2013, suggesting that the weakening of EASM since the late 1970s is unprecedented in the past 249 years. Similarly, the significantly correlating region in the spatial correlation analysis, covering the Meiyu/Baiu/Changma rainfall belt and India, have also undergone a climatic shift since the late 1970s according to previous papers.