Karen King
University of Tennessee-Knoxville, TN·Earth & Environmental Science·Early-career
Heat waves, droughts and shifts in snowmelt are hard to judge from instrument records alone, because those records cover only about a century. Tree rings extend the record back hundreds of years.
- Fields
Earth & Environmental Science
Ecology & Evolution
- Topics
dendrochronology
tree rings
paleoclimate
- Grants
- 3 known grants, through Jun 2031
What they work on
- Use quantitative wood anatomy, measurements of individual wood cells in tree rings, to build high-resolution temperature and precipitation records over the last millennium across temperate North America.
- Identify and quantify natural drivers of extreme weather before the Industrial era using the improved tree-ring climate records.
- Measure blue intensity in existing Pacific Northwest tree-ring collections to reconstruct 500 years of spring and summer precipitation and temperature in the Columbia River Basin.
- Split seasonal climate reconstructions into daily values and run a distributed water balance model to reconstruct daily Columbia River streamflow, capturing snowmelt timing and seasonal flood and drought risk.
- Build the North American Temperature Atlas, a gridded warm-season temperature reconstruction from blue intensity and latewood density data, and compare it with drought and precipitation atlases to measure temperature's role in past droughts.
More about the research
Each year's growth ring stores clues about that season's temperature and moisture. These projects use tree-ring science (dendrochronology) to rebuild past climate across North America at higher detail than before. The goal is to place today's extreme weather, hot droughts and changing river flows in a long-term context.
Why it matters
Water managers, farmers, fisheries and communities facing hot droughts, wildfire risk and shifting floods need to know how unusual today's extremes are. Centuries-long records of temperature, rainfall and daily Columbia River streamflow could help with water planning, salmon and ecosystem management, and drought risk assessment. A publicly accessible temperature atlas would let resource managers place current events in long-term context.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
CAREER: High-Resolution Modeling of Late Holocene Environmental Volatility in Temperate North America: Using Quantitative Wood Anatomy to Improve Understanding of Extreme Weather
NSF · Jul 2026 – Jun 2031
Collaborative Research: Shifting Snow, Changing Flow--Quantifying Warming-Induced Seasonal Streamflow Changes in the Snow-Fed Columbia River over the Past 500 Years
NSF · Sep 2025 – Aug 2027
Collaborative Research: The North American Temperature Atlas--A Climate Field Reconstruction for Investigating Effects of Temperature on Past Droughts
NSF · Aug 2024 – Jul 2027
Closest labs
Nicole Davi
William Paterson University of New Jersey, NJ·Earth & Environmental Science
Develop two 1,000-year records of wood anatomical traits, such as cell wall thickness, frost rings and blue rings, from Siberian larch and Siberian pine in Mongolia to capture brief temperature extremes.
Jason Smerdon
Columbia University, NY·Earth & Environmental Science
Reconstruct wet-season rainfall over at least the last 200 years across the neotropics by measuring stable oxygen isotopes (δ18O) in tree-ring cellulose from Guatemala, Honduras, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia and Chile.
Diana Thatcher
Iowa State University, IA·Earth & Environmental Science
Reconstruct annually resolved, millennial-length northeast Pacific sea-surface temperatures from growth increments in shells of the Pacific geoduck, a long-lived marine clam.
The school
University of Tennessee-Knoxville: 16 labs on PI Pages, $387M a year on research, 426 research doctorates a year.
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