In an interval of just 1-2 decades, the nature of tropical forest destruction has changed. Rather than being dominated by rural farmers, tropical deforestation now is substantially driven by major industries and economic globalization, with timber operations, oil and gas development, large-scale farming and exotic-tree plantations being the most frequent causes of forest loss. Although instigat...

Understanding the resilience of moist tropical forests to treefall disturbance events is important for understanding the mechanisms that underlie species coexistence and for predicting the future composition of these ecosystems. Here, we test whether variation in the functional composition of Amazonian forests determines their resilience to disturbance.We studied the legacy of natural treefall ...

BACKGROUND African tropical rainforests are one of the most important hotspots to look for changes in the upcoming decades when it comes to C storage and release. The focus of studying C dynamics in these systems lies traditionally on living aboveground biomass. Belowground soil organic carbon stocks have received little attention and estimates of the size, controls and distribution of soil org...

Objectively derived resolution-dependent criteria are defined for the detection of tropical cyclones in model simulations and observationally based analyses. These criteria are derived from the wind profiles of observed tropical cyclones, averaged at various resolutions. Both an analytical wind profile model and two-dimensional observed wind analyses are used. The results show that the threshol...

Tropical cyclones (TCs) can have devastating socioeconomic impacts. Understanding the nature and causes of their variability is of paramount importance for society. However, historical records of TCs are too short to fully characterize such changes and paleo-sediment archives of Holocene TC activity are temporally and geographically sparse. Thus, it is of interest to apply physical modeling to ...

An ingredients-based approach (e.g., Johns and Doswell 1992) is used in the operational prediction of tornado threat, regardless of whether the favorable environment results from midlatitude or tropical perturbations. Since the majority of tropical cyclone (TC) tornadoes are associated with supercells (Edwards et al. 2012a; hereafter E12), the forecaster typically can focus on the same ingredie...

Recent research to increase understanding, and techniques to improve forecasts, of the structure and structural changes of a tropical cyclone due to interaction with the environment are summarized. The atmospheric environment is considered here, and the oceanic, and air-sea interface environments are summarized in Topic 1.3. Progress in understanding how a tropical cyclone interacts with its en...

This paper simulates the increase in the average annual loss from tropical cyclones in the North Atlantic for the years 2015 and 2050. The simulation is based on assumptions concerning wealth trends in the regions affected by the storms, considered by the change in material assets (capital stock). Further assumptions are made about the trend in storm intensity resulting from anthropogenic clima...

SUMMARY As Britain's imperial and colonial ambitions intensified toward the end of the nineteenth century, the preservation of white European health in tropical climates became an increasingly important concern. Since at least the seventeenth century, the "tropics" had been seen as spaces holding vast potential wealth but also death and disease. To combat these deadly but desirable landscapes, ...

We revisit a model of feedback processes proposed by Lindzen et al. (2001), in which an assumed 22% reduction in the area of tropical high clouds per degree increase in sea surface temperature produces negative feedbacks associated with upper tropospheric water vapor and cloud radiative effects. We argue that the water vapor feedback is overestimated in Lindzen et al. (2001) by at least 60%, an...