Dorian J. Burnette

University of Memphis | U of M · Department of Earth Sciences

Rivers are critical corridors that connect cities and ecosystems alike. When drought develops, water levels fall, making river navigation harder and more expensive. In 2022, water levels in some of the world’s largest rivers, including the Rhine in Europe and the Yangtze in China, fell to historically low levels. The Mississippi River fell so low i...

Tree-ring reconstructions of the soil moisture balance over North America reveal several, region-wide, multi-decadal droughts impacted the northern Lower Mississippi Valley between AD 1250 and 1450. These chronic droughts contributed to regional abandonments and population migrations southward out of the Mississippi-Ohio rivers confluence region an...

Season-to-season persistence of soil moisture drought varies across North America. Such interseasonal autocorrelation can have modest skill in forecasting future conditions several months in advance. Because robust instrumental observations of precipitation span less than 100 years, the temporal stability of the relationship between seasonal moistu...

Cool and warm season precipitation totals have been reconstructed on a gridded basis for North America using 439 tree-ring chronologies correlated with December-April totals and 547 different chronologies correlated with May-July totals. These discrete seasonal chronologies are not significantly correlated with the alternate season and the December...

As part of a broader weather system, parts of northwestern Mississippi (Marshall and DeSoto Counties) and southwestern Tennessee (Shelby and Fayette Counties) received very large rainfall amounts, on the night of June 6 and early hours of June 7, 2019. Specifically, the NWS “one-day observed precipitation” product, based on gage-corrected radar dat...

The teleconnection of the El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) to instrumental precipitation and temperature during the cool season over North America is strongest and most temporally stable in the TexMex sector of northern Mexico and the borderlands of southwestern United States. The ENSO impact on North American hydroclimate expands and contracts...

The southeastern region of the United States exhibits an unusual trend of decreasing tree species richness (TSR) from higher to lower latitudes over the Florida peninsula. This trend contradicts the widely marked latitudinal diversity gradient where species richness is highest in tropical zones and decreases towards extratropical regions. This stud...

Abstract Question: Do river channelization and a common invasive shrub, Ligustrum sinense Lour. (Chinese privet), affect tree growth rates in forested riverine wetlands? Location: Three sites along the Wolf River, in and near Memphis, Tennessee, USA. Methods:We cored and analysed 83 oak trees within three study sites. Correlations of river channeli...

Old Rocky Mountain Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii) trees and remnant "subfossil" logs have been found on the outcrop of a mafic igneous intrusion above the Mancos River Valley near Mesa Verde National Park. These trees and logs have been used to develop earlywood (EW), latewood (LW), and total ring width (TRW) chronologies dating from AD 722-20...

Freshwater discharge into Albemarle Sound and many other large estuaries can have a major impact on the physical and biological properties of the estuary. Earlywood (EW) and latewood (LW) width tree ring chronologies recently developed from ancient trees and sub-fossil logs found at Devil’s Gut of the Roanoke River, North Carolina, were used with n...

Ancient blue oak trees are still widespread across the foothills of the Coast Ranges, Cascades and Sierra Nevada in California. The most extensive tracts of intact old-growth blue oak woodland appear to survive on rugged and remote terrain in the southern Coast Ranges and on the foothills west and southwest of Mt. Lassen. In the authors' sampling o...

A computer program, Historical Observation Tools (HOB Tools), has been developed to facilitate many of the calculations used by historical climatologists to develop instrumental and documentary temperature and precipitation datasets and makes them readily accessible to other researchers. The primitive methodology used by the early weather observers...

Three new 159-year long reconstructions of spring, summer, and growing season precipitation totals were developed for northeastern Kansas and northwestern Missouri from five station clusters (Lawrence, Leavenworth, and Manhattan, Kansas; Miami and Oregon, Missouri). Nonstandard observation practices are inherent in the early meteorological data, wh...

A new tree-ring reconstruction of the Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI) for Mesoamerica from AD 771 to 2008 identifies megadroughts more severe and sustained than any witnessed during the twentieth century. Correlation analyses indicate strong forcing of instrumental and reconstructed June PDSI over Mesoamerica from the El Niño/Southern Oscillat...

Blue oak tree-ring chronologies correlate highly with winter–spring precipitation totals over California, with Sacramento and San Joaquin river stream flow, and with seasonal variations in the salinity gradient in San Francisco Bay. The convergence of fresh and saline currents can influence turbidity, sediment accumulation, and biological productiv...

Ancient Montezuma baldcypress (Taxodium mucronatum) trees found in Barranca de Amealco, Queretaro, have been used to develop a 1,238-year tree-ring chronology that is correlated with precipitation, temperature, drought indices, and crop yields in central Mexico. This chronology has been used to reconstruct the spring-early summer soil moisture bala...

A continuous record of 65 987 daily-mean temperature observations since 1828 has been developed for Manhattan, Kansas, by screening and correcting original station records of the U.S. Army Surgeon General, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Signal Service. Hourly, minimum, and maximum temperature observations from seven discontinuous historical s...

Spatial patterns of the drought and hurricane tracks were reconstructed for 1860. These reveal a typical La Niña pattern over the conterminous United States that would be analogous to an active Atlantic hurricane season. Precipitation frequency for April through October 1860 was calculated for the conterminous United States from 252 instrumental st...

Precipitation over the southwestern United States exhibits distinctive seasonality, and contrasting ocean-atmospheric dynamics are involved in the interannual variability of cool- and warm-season totals. Tree-ring chronologies based on annual-ring widths of conifers in the southwestern United States are well correlated with accumulated precipitatio...

Prolonged drought conditions have persisted over western North America since at least 1999, affecting snowpack, stream discharge, reservoir levels, and wildfire activity [Mote et al., 2005; Westerling et al., 2006; MacDonald et al., 2008]. Instrumental precipitation, temperature, and Palmer Drought Severity Indices (PDSI) indicate that severe and s...