Publications
Skillful long‐range prediction of European and North American winters
Publication ID: pub.1037527257
Publication date: 09/04/2014
Keywords: Europe; North America; North Atlantic; Prediction; Regional Climate; Signal-to-noise Ratio
Until recently, long-range forecast systems showed only modest levels of skill in predicting surface winter climate around the Atlantic Basin and associated fluctuations in the North Atlantic Oscillation at seasonal lead times. Here we use a new forecast system to assess seasonal predictability of winter North Atlantic climate. We demonstrate that key aspects of European […]
Size and frequency of natural forest disturbances and the Amazon forest carbon balance
Publication ID: pub.1052634881
Publication date: 18/03/2014
Keywords: Amazonia; Carbon; Forests
Forest inventory studies in the Amazon indicate a large terrestrial carbon sink. However, field plots may fail to represent forest mortality processes at landscape-scales of tropical forests. Here we characterize the frequency distribution of disturbance events in natural forests from 0.01 ha to 2,651 ha size throughout Amazonia using a novel combination of forest inventory, airborne lidar […]
An update to the Surface Ocean CO2 Atlas (SOCAT version 2)
Publication ID: pub.1038996947
Publication date: 07/03/2014
Keywords: Data Coverage; Fugacity of Carbon Dioxide; Global; Metadata; Models; Ocean Carbon Sink; Surface Ocean CO2 Atlas (SOCAT) Version 2; Update; Variation
Abstract. The Surface Ocean CO2 Atlas (SOCAT), an activity of the international marine carbon research community, provides access to synthesis and gridded fCO2 (fugacity of carbon dioxide) products for the surface oceans. Version 2 of SOCAT is an update of the previous release (version 1) with more data (increased from 6.3 million to 10.1 million […]
Fast demographic traits promote high diversification rates of Amazonian trees
Publication ID: pub.1014227251
Publication date: 03/03/2014
Keywords: Amazon; Biodiversity; Models, Biological; South America; Trees; Tropical Climate
The Amazon rain forest sustains the world’s highest tree diversity, but it remains unclear why some clades of trees are hyperdiverse, whereas others are not. Using dated phylogenies, estimates of current species richness and trait and demographic data from a large network of forest plots, we show that fast demographic traits–short turnover times–are associated with […]
Economic and physical determinants of the global distributions of crop pests and pathogens
Publication ID: pub.1052176984
Publication date: 11/02/2014
Keywords: Crops, Agricultural; Geography; Gross Domestic Product; Internationality; Publications
Crop pests and pathogens pose a significant and growing threat to food security, but their geographical distributions are poorly understood. We present a global analysis of pest and pathogen distributions, to determine the roles of socioeconomic and biophysical factors in determining pest diversity, controlling for variation in observational capacity among countries. Known distributions of 1901 […]
Satellite observations of cloud regime development: the role of aerosol processes
Publication ID: pub.1050954259
Publication date: 03/02/2014
Keywords: Aerosol Index (AI); Aerosol Retrieval; Cloud and Aerosol Properties; Cloud Fraction (CF); Cloud Regime Development; Correlations; Global; Meteorological Factors; MODIS AI; Satellite Observations; Stratocumulus Persistence; Transitions
Abstract. Many different interactions between aerosols and clouds have been postulated, based on correlations between satellite retrieved aerosol and cloud properties. Previous studies highlighted the importance of meteorological covariations to the observed correlations. In this work, we make use of multiple temporally-spaced satellite retrievals to observe the development of cloud regimes. The observation of cloud […]
