Introductory Overview

Television images of floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, snow and ice storms, and drought conditions are among the most vivid that leap into our minds when we think of short-term climatic events and their often obvious and direct ecosystem responses. The images are so striking that they tend to crowd out...

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Bibliographic Details
Other Authors: Greenland, David, Goodin, Douglas G., Smith, Raymond C.
Format: Book Part
Language:unknown
Published: Oxford University Press 2003
Subjects:
Online Access:http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780195150599.003.0006
Description
Summary:Television images of floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, snow and ice storms, and drought conditions are among the most vivid that leap into our minds when we think of short-term climatic events and their often obvious and direct ecosystem responses. The images are so striking that they tend to crowd out thoughts of longer term events. Yet, in many cases, even the longer term climatic events are often represented by the media as some manifestation of an individual severe weather event. The LTER sites have experienced a wide variety of severe weather events. Some of these are discussed in various chapters of this book. However, many other noteworthy instances are not treated in these pages. For example, we do not discuss the playa at the Jornada LTER site that has experienced a 100- year return period storm that filled the normally dry lake with water and brought to the fore many life forms that were surprising to Jornada investigators. Neither do we have room for the work at the Hubbard Brook LTER site by researchers who have documented in detail the effects on their trees of one of the most severe ice storms of the last century. Several other short-term climatic events, such as the 1996 flood at the Andrews rain forest, are discussed in the chapters of this book beyond this first section. In Part I the focus is on hurricanes, drought, and the shortterm climatic events and ecosystem responses in the Arctic LTER site in Alaska. Emery Boose of the Harvard Forest LTER in central Massachusetts introduces a Harvard Forest study on the effects of hurricanes on forest ecosystems in chapter 2. A strong hurricane passed over central New England in 1938 and left an indelible memory both in the minds of the inhabitants who experienced it and on the landscape. This stimulated Harvard Forest researchers to investigate the past history of hurricanes in their region and even to simulate a hurricane in their forest and study its effects on the ecosystem. The latter has become one of the legendary classic experiments of the LTER ...