Palaeoclimatology provides our only means of assessing climatic variations before the beginning of instrumental records. The various proxy variables used, however, have a number of limitations which must be adequately addressed and understood. Besides their obvious spatial and seasonal limitations, different proxies are also potentially limited in their ability to represent climatic variations ...

There are mcreasing concerns in the forestry community about global climate change and variability associated with elevated atmospheric CO2. Changes in precipitation and increases in air temperature could impose additional stress on forests during the next century. For a study site in Carteret County, North Carolina, the General Circulation Model, HADCM2, predicts that by the year 2099, maximum...

Climate has a strong influence on the tourism and recreation sector and in some regions represents the natural resource on which the tourism industry is predicated. There has been little consideration of how climate change might affect the tourism climate resource or how such changes could alter the competitive relationships between tourism destinations. This study used a modified version of Mi...

The issues of downscaling the results from global climate models (GCMs) to a scale relevant for hydrological impact studies are examined. GCM outputs, typically at a spatial resolution of around 3° latitude and 4° longitude, are currently not considered reliable at time scales shorter than 1 month. Continuous rainfall-runoff modelling for flood regime assessment requires input at the daily or e...

Local studies aimed at assessing the impact of climate variability on crop yield at the individual farm level require the use of weather and climate data. These are often collected at points known as meteorological stations. In West Africa, meteorological stations are sparsely distributed and as a result, are often unable to satisfy the data requirements for such studies. One major problem aris...

Many infectious diseases of humans, including malaria, dengue, cholera, and schistosomiasis, are restricted to, or more prevalent in, tropical and subtropical zones. Within the tropics and subtropics, they are more prevalent at lower than at higher altitudes. Warmer temperatures characteristic of lower latitudes and altitudes generally increase rates of survival, development, and replication of...

This study compares the variability of surface air temperature in three long coupled ocean–atmosphere general circulation model integrations. It is shown that the annual mean climatology of the surface air temperatures (SAT) in all three models is realistic and the linear trends over the 1000-yr integrations are small over most areas of the globe. Second, although there are notable differences ...