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University of Tennessee, Knoxville

Climate

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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Hazardous Weather And Human Response In The Southeastern United States, Daniel Burow May 2021

Hazardous Weather And Human Response In The Southeastern United States, Daniel Burow

Doctoral Dissertations

Effectively mitigating the human costs of future hazardous weather events requires examining meteorological threats, their long-term patterns, and human response to these events. The southeastern United States is a region that has both a high climatological risk and a high societal vulnerability to many different meteorological hazards. In this dissertation, I study hazardous weather and human response in the Southeast through three different lenses: identifying uniquely simultaneous hazards posed by tropical cyclones, assessing precipitation and synoptic weather patterns on hazardous weather days, and examining patterns in intended response to tornado watches. I find that simultaneous and collocated tornado and flash …


Climate Drivers Of Wildfire Activity In The Magdalena Mountains Of New Mexico, U.S.A., Elizabeth Anne Schneider Aug 2014

Climate Drivers Of Wildfire Activity In The Magdalena Mountains Of New Mexico, U.S.A., Elizabeth Anne Schneider

Masters Theses

In recent years, crown fires have raged through mixed-conifer forests in the American Southwest that historically experienced frequent, low-severity wildfires. Land management agencies now wish to restore wildfires to their historical range of variability, but this requires information on fire regimes before Euro-American disturbance took place. We characterized the historical fire regime of a high elevation, mixed-conifer forest in the Magdalena Mountains, New Mexico. This research evaluated the different climate drivers, represented by the Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI), the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), and the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO), that influence the occurrence of …


Fire Regimes Of Lower-Elevation Forests In Great Smoky Mountains National Park, Tennessee, U.S.A., Lisa Battaile Laforest Aug 2012

Fire Regimes Of Lower-Elevation Forests In Great Smoky Mountains National Park, Tennessee, U.S.A., Lisa Battaile Laforest

Doctoral Dissertations

Disturbance is a natural part of any forest ecosystem. When disturbance regimes are altered, the forest stands will reflect those changes. Southern Appalachian xeric pine-oak woodlands are one forest type that has experienced such change, primarily in the form of fire suppression. The western side of Great Smoky Mountains National Park contains stands of large trees that escaped earlier intensive logging, show evidence of past fire, and provide an ideal setting for reconstructing stand histories. For three lower-elevation (ca. 500 m ASL) study sites, I used crossdated yellow pine tree-ring chronologies and records from cross-sections taken from living and dead …


Influences Of Climate And Anthropogenic Disturbances On Wildfire Regimes Of The Zuni Mountains, New Mexico, U.S.A., Monica Tyson Rother Aug 2010

Influences Of Climate And Anthropogenic Disturbances On Wildfire Regimes Of The Zuni Mountains, New Mexico, U.S.A., Monica Tyson Rother

Masters Theses

This research examined the fire history of ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa Douglas ex P. Lawson & C. Lawson) forests in northwestern New Mexico. The study area included three sites in the Zuni Mountains of Cibola National Forest and one site along the boundary of El Malpais National Monument. I crossdated over 800 fire scars on 75 samples to reconstruct spatial and temporal characteristics of historic wildfire regimes. The Weibull Median Interval, Weibull Modal Interval, and Mean Fire Interval ranged from five to eight years across all sites and percent-scarred classes (all fires, 10% scarred, and 25% scarred) and indicated that …