The relationship between cave temperature and local atmospheric mean temperature in monsoonal china

It is widely claimed that temperature inside a deep Karst cave without significant human influence is similar to local mean atmospheric temperature. To test this assumption, we collected temperature data for caves through China from published documents. The difference between cave temperature and local annually mean temperature (ΔT) were then calculated. The results show that theΔT is larger than 2 Celsius degrees for nearly half of caves. Among these caves, ΔT is larger for caves from Northern China than those from southern China. Many of them have underground river. This indicates that underground river may be one of the influencing factors of cave temperature. Cave temperature excurse from local mean atmospheric temperature and (or) seasonal bias should be considered in paleoclimate reconstruction using speleothem records.