The monograph covers the fundamentals and the consequences of extreme geophysical phenomena like asteroid impacts, climatic change, earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, landslides, volcanic eruptions, flooding, and space weather. This monograph also addresses their associated, local and worldwide socio-economic impacts. The understanding and modeling of these phenomena is critical to the development of timely worldwide strategies for the prediction of natural and anthropogenic extreme events...

This book focuses on two major challenges in the climate sciences: 1) to describe the decadal-to-centennial variations in instrumental and proxy records; and 2) to distinguish between anthropogenic variations and natural variability. The National Taiwan University invited some of the world's leading experts across the areas of observational analysis, mathematical theory, and modeling to discuss these two issues. The outcome of the meeting is the 23 chapters in this book that review the sta...

Global warming and human-induced climate change are perhaps the most important scientific issues of our time. These issues continue to be debated in the scientific community and in the media without true consensus about the role of greenhouse gas emissions as a contributing factor. Evidence-Based Climate Science: Data opposing CO2 emissions as the primary source of global warming objectively gathers and analyzes scientific data concerning patterns of past climate changes, influences of cha...

First Published in 2004. Climate Since A.D. 1500 presents a unique perspective on the 'Little Ice Age' and the climate of the twentieth century. Leading scientists explore historical documents, dendroclimatic data and ice core records from all over the world, presenting an invaluable compilation for all those concerned with past climate and the risks of man-made climatic change in the future. This revised edition includes a new chapter summarizing the wealth of literature on climatic chang...

Published by the American Geophysical Union as part of the Geophysical Monograph Series, Volume 200.Trajectory-based (“Lagrangian”) atmospheric transport and dispersion modeling has gained in popularity and sophistication over the previous several decades. It is common practice now for researchers around the world to apply Lagrangian models to a wide spectrum of issues.Lagrangian Modeling of the Atmosphere is a comprehensive volume that includes sections on Lagrang...

The field of paleoclimatology relies on physical, chemical, and biological proxies of past climate changes that have been preserved in natural archives such as glacial ice, tree rings, sediments, corals, and speleothems. Paleoclimate archives obtained through field investigations, ocean sediment coring expeditions, ice sheet coring programs, and other projects allow scientists to reconstruct climate change over much of earth's history.When combined with computer model simulations, ...

Oceans account for 50% of the anthropogenic CO2 released into the atmosphere. During the past 15 years an international programme, the Joint Global Ocean Flux Study (JGOFS), has been studying the ocean carbon cycle to quantify and model the biological and physical processes whereby CO2 is pumped from the ocean's surface to the depths of the ocean, where it can remain for hundreds of years. This project is one of the largest multi-disciplinary studies of the oceans ever carried out and this...

Based largely on an International Commission on Dynamical Meteorology (ICDM) workshop, this timely volume, written by leading researchers in the field, covers a range of important research issues related to high-impact weather and extreme climate events. Dynamical linkages between these extremes and various atmospheric and ocean phenomena are examined, including Atlantic Multidecadal, North Atlantic, and Madden–Julian Oscillations; Annular Modes; tropical cyclones; and Asian monsoons. This...

Hurricanes are nature’s most destructive agents. Widespread interest surrounds the possibility that they might get even more destructive in the future. Policy makers consider it a call for action. Answers about when and by how much hurricanes will change are sought by financial institutions especially industry. And scientists are challenged by the range and interactions of the processes involved. This book, arising from the 2nd International Summit on Hurricanes and Climate Change, contain...

Published by the American Geophysical Union as part of the Geophysical Monograph Series, Volume 196.Extreme Events and Natural Hazards: The Complexity Perspective examines recent developments in complexity science that provide a new approach to understanding extreme events. This understanding is critical to the development of strategies for the prediction of natural hazards and mitigation of their adverse consequences. The volume is a comprehensive collection of current de...

Recent studies suggest that tropical cyclones are more powerful than in the past with the most dramatic increase in the North Atlantic. The increase is correlated with an increase in ocean temperature. A debate concerns the nature of these increases with some scientists attributing them to a natural climate fluctuation and others suggesting climate change related to anthropogenic increases in forcing from greenhouse gases.A Summit on Hurricanes and Climate Change was held during th...

This book aims to compile some of the important results from the latest research in climate variation and prediction studies with a focus on the role of the ocean, particularly in the Indo-Pacific region. Several new modes of ocean-atmosphere climate variations have been discovered in the last decade, and the advance of climate models have made it possible to predict some of these modes several seasons ahead. This has improved the society's ability to use model predictions to mitigate clim...