The transfer of upper kilometer water from the Indian Ocean into the South Atlantic, the Agulhas leakage, is believed to be accomplished primarily through meso-scale eddy processes. There have been various studies investigating eddies of the ‘‘Cape Basin Cauldron’’ from specific data sets. The hydrographic data archive acquired during the last century within the Cape Basin region of the South A...

One challenge in Earth science research is the accurate and efficient ad-hoc query and retrieval of Earth science satellite sensor data based on user-defined criteria to study and analyze atmospheric events such as tropical cyclones. The problem can be formulated as a spatiotemporal join query to identify the spatio-temporal location where moving sensor objects and dynamic atmospheric event obj...

By using a half soap bubble heated from below, we obtain large isolated single vortices whose properties as well as their intensity are measured under different conditions. By studying the effects of rotation of the bubble on the vortex properties, we found that rotation favors vortices near the pole. Rotation also inhibits long life time vortices. The velocity and vorticity profiles of the vor...

Super typhoons (STYs), intense tropical cyclones of the western North Pacific, rank among the most destructive natural hazards globally. The violent winds of these storms induce deep mixing of the upper ocean, resulting in strong sea surface cooling and making STYs highly sensitive to ocean density stratification. Although a few studies examined the potential impacts of changes in ocean thermal...

We find that long-period variations in tropical cyclone and hurricane frequency over the past century in the North Atlantic Ocean have occurred as three relatively stable regimes separated by sharp transitions. Each regime has seen 50% more cyclones and hurricanes than the previous regime and is associated with a distinct range of sea surface temperatures (SSTs) in the eastern Atlantic Ocean. O...

[1] The dependence of the air-sea momentum flux on surface wave fields is investigated at very high winds under tropical cyclones. A coupled wave-wind model is applied to estimate the momentum flux under ten hurricanes in the western Atlantic Ocean during 1998–2003. The model explicitly calculates the wave-induced stress vector and the total wind stress vector from a given wind speed vector and...

issues of science and politics. Because of their significant and visceral impacts, discussion of extreme events is a frequent locus of such conflation. Linda Mearns, of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), aptly characterizes this context: “There’s a push on climatologists to say something about extremes, because they are so important. But that can be very dangerous if we really...