Daily climate data reveal stronger climate-growth relationships for an extended European tree-ring network

An extended European tree-ring network was compiled from various sources of tree-ring data from Europe, northern Africa and western Asia. A total of 1860 tree-ring chronologies were used to compare correlation coefficients calculated with aggregated day-wise and month-wise mean temperature, sums of precipitation and standardised precipitation-evapotranspiration index (SPEI). For the daily approach, climate data were aggregated over periods ranging from 21 to 365 days. Absolute correlations calculated with day-wise aggregated climate data were on average higher by 0.060 (temperature data), 0.076 (precipitation data) and 0.075 (SPEI data). Bootstrapped correlations are computationally expensive and were therefore calculated on a 69.4% subset of the data. Bootstrapped correlations indicated statistically significant differences between the daily and monthly approach in approximately 1% of examples. A comparison of time windows used for calculations of correlations revealed slightly later onset and earlier ending day of the year for the daily approach, while the largest differences between the two approaches arise from window lengths: Correlations calculated with day-wise aggregated climate data were calculated using fewer days than the monthly approach. Differences in the onset and ending dates of periods for the daily and monthly approaches were greater for precipitation and SPEI data than for temperature data. (C) 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.