Trawl Survey Based Fish Responses to Hurricanes along the North American Coastline

Tropical cyclones play a fundamental role in driving the dynamics of coastal ecosystems in the regions where they regularly occur.  As climate patterns shift, the frequency, characteristics, and spatial distributions of tropical cyclones is shifting, making it important to understand the mechanisms underlying ecosystem responses to storms to allow forecasting.  Evaluation of patterns relating storm characteristics, local environment, and ecosystem responses provides one pathway toward developing a comprehensive understanding of processes creating observed patterns.  Data aggregated in this dataset quantifies the responses of fishes to tropical cyclones and is produced entirely from monthly growing season trawl surveys occurring over decadal time scales.  These are primarily publicly available data sources supporting fisheries independent monitoring along with several contributions from individual research programs (e.g UNC Chapel Hill, VIMS). The 196 named storms included in the dataset span the period from 1974 to 2021 within along embayments, estuaries, and shallow nearshore zones along the Atlantic Ocean coast from 55 unique locations occurring between 26.3 and 38.5 Latitude and -84.8 and -97.1 Longitude. These data include 64 unique response variables covering a variety of different levels of organismal organization ranging from species specific abundance to community level metrics such as biodiversity and richness and total of 188,982 unique response records.   

Meteorological data characterizing tropical cyclones are also presented and are derived from:

IBTrACS: International Best Track Archive for Climate Stewardship

Global storm track data set for all recorded low pressure systems and tropical cyclones dating back to 1842. Data includes timestamped spatial information on storm center location as well as meteorological readings of wind speed, wind direction, and barometric pressure. Most importantly for the purposes of this data set, wind speeds at various distances from storm center are provided, which allows for the development of a model of wind speed with distance for different category storms.

GRIDMET: University of Idaho Gridded Surface Meteorological Dataset

The Gridded Surface Meteorological dataset provides high spatial resolution (~4-km) daily surface fields of temperature, precipitation, winds, humidity and radiation across the contiguous United States from 1979. The dataset blends the high resolution spatial data from PRISM with the high temporal resolution data from the National Land Data Assimilation System (NLDAS) to produce spatially and temporally continuous fields that lend themselves to additional land surface modeling.

This dataset contains provisional