Abstract:Since the vegetation of the timberline area at Mount Taibai in the Qinling mountains is of high elevation and rarely disturbed by anthropogenic activities,it is sensitive to climate change, thereby providing a proxy resource of past climate change information. However, to date, there have been no investigations that have integrated dendrochronological methods with Arcgis spatial analysis techniques to reconstruct the past climate change at specific elevations and locations. Herein, we presented a reconstruction based on extracted meteorological data from spatial interpolation and Larix chinensis tree ring widths. Climate growth response analysis revealed that the air temperature,particularly from March to June, was the principle factor that limited the radial growth of L. chinensis. By using dendrochronology techniques, we obtained a reconstruction of the March to June mean air temperature for the timberline of Mount Taibai over the period from 1870 to 2013. The reconstruction captured 57.2% of the temperature variance(55.5% after the degree of freedom is adjusted) after removing the tree-ring width values of 1997 and 1998 during the calibration periods. On the decadal scale, the pattern of cool-warm fluctuations exhibited frequent repetitive features., On average, the cold periods (16 years) always persist longer than the warm periods(10.8 years).The years 1870-1881, 1903-1918, and 1977-1996 were colder periods, whereas the years 1882-1892, 1919-1929, 1950-960, and 1997-2013 were relatively warmer. The temperature variations indicated three quasi-periodic changes on scales of 22-31 a,18-22 a and 10-13 a, which suggested that the Mount Taibai region may be associated with a huge-scale climate drive and solar activity. Our reconstruction exhibited good consistency with local historical records and reconstruction results from similar climatic regions for the same intervals.