Yellowstone National Park Is Hotter Than Ever

Yellowstone National Park is famous for harsh winters but a new study shows summers are also getting hotter, with August 2016 ranking as one of the hottest summers in the last 1, 250 years. The new study drew upon samples of living and dead Engelmann spruce trees collected at high elevations in and around Yellowstone National Park. Engelmann spruce live between 600 and 800 years and rot relatively slowly. The pristine setting of Yellowstone National Park provided an opportunity to source samples from living and downed trees dating back 1, 250 years. Previously, temperature records for the Yellowstone region were only available going back to 1905. The findings were published in Geophysical Research Letters. The Greater Yellowstone dataset is publicly available on the International TreeRing Data Bank from NOAA. The climate data gleaned from the tree ring samples fits closely with the instrumental record over the past 100 years. The team was also able to identify several known periods of warming in the tree ring