The Indian Ocean Tsunami focused world attention on societal responses to environmental hazards and the potential of natural systems to moderate disturbance effects. Coastal areas are critical to the welfare of up to 50% of the world’s population. Coastal systems in the southern United States are adapted to specific disturbance regimes of tropical cyclones (hurricanes) and fire. In August and S...

The ability of wetlands to retain P makes them an important landscape feature that buffers P movement. However, their P retention ability can be compromised through hydrologic disturbances caused by hurricanes and tropical storms (TS). This study had three objectives: (i) to determine the effects of hurricanes and TS on dissolved phosphorus (DP) concentrations and loads discharged from a Coasta...

The hurricane remains one of the outstanding enigmas of fluid dynamics. This is so, in part, because the phenomenon is comparatively difficult to observe and because no laboratory analogue has been discovered. To this it must be added that hurricanes have received surprisingly little attention from the theoretically inclined fluid dynamicist, perhaps owing to an understandable tendency to avoid...