Moist shallow‐water response to tropical forcing: Initial‐value problems

Response of the Tropical Atmosphere to Local, Steady Forcing

A theoretical analysis is made of the large-scale, stationary, zonally asymmetric motions that result from heating and the orographic effect in the tropical atmosphere. The release of latent heat dominates the sensible and radiational heating and the latter two effects are ignored. The first linear model is a continuous stratified atmosphere in solid westward rotation with no dissipation. Of al...

Transition to a Moist Greenhouse with CO2 and solar forcing

Water-rich planets such as Earth are expected to become eventually uninhabitable, because liquid water turns unstable at the surface as temperatures increase with solar luminosity. Whether a large increase of atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases such as CO2 could also destroy the habitability of water-rich planets has remained unclear. Here we show with three-dimensional aqua-planet s...

The Effect of Moist Convection on the Tropospheric Response to Tropical and Subtropical Zonally Asymmetric Torques

Tropospheric winds can be altered by vertical transfers of momentum due to orographic gravity waves and convection. Previous work showed that, in dry models, such zonally asymmetric torques produce a pattern of tropical ascent that is well described by linear dynamics, together withmeridional shifts of the midlatitude jet. Here a series of idealizedmodels is used to understand the effects of mo...

Moist Tropical Forests: Structure, Function and Management

Structural Dynamics of Tropical Moist Forest Gaps

Gap phase dynamics are the dominant mode of forest turnover in tropical forests. However, gap processes are infrequently studied at the landscape scale. Airborne lidar data offer detailed information on three-dimensional forest structure, providing a means to characterize fine-scale (1 m) processes in tropical forests over large areas. Lidar-based estimates of forest structure (top down) differ...