Schematic representation of the ocean biological pump

On the whole, the problem of assessing the role of hurricanes in the formation of gas exchange at the atmosphere-ocean boundary remains to be studied. Clearly, in the tropical low-productive zone of the World Ocean, where atmospheric C02 assimilation is negligibly small, getting reliable estimates of the increase in ecosystem productivity during the passage of tropical hurricanes will make it possible to specify the role of the World Ocean in regulating climate. 

2 Natural disaster as a dynamic category of environmental phenomena 

When considering the prospects for life on Earth, we can only proceed from human assessment of the level of environmental degradation. In due course local and 

Let the approach of the moment of a natural disaster be characterized by vector. v, that gets into some cluster of multi-dimensional phase space Xy. In other words, converting our verbal portrait to quantitative estimation of this process, we introduce a generalized characteristic I t) of a natural disaster and identify it by calibrated scale E, for which we postulate the presence of relationships of type E] S2, Ej S2, or E] = E2. This means that there always exists a value of I(t) = p which determines when a natural catastrophe of a given type can be expected E — p =/ (S), where / is conversion of the notion of natural disaster into a number. As a result, magnitude 6 = I t) — p determines the expected time interval before the catastrophe occurs. 

Let us search for a satisfactory model to transform our verbal portrait of a natural catastrophe into notions and indicators subject to formalized description and transformation. With this aim in view, we select m elements of subsystems at the lowest level in the N U H system, the interaction between which we determine using the matrix function A = a,/, where ait is an indicator of the level of dependence of the relationships between subsystems i and j. Then, the I(t) parameter can be estimated as the sum  

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Figure 5.3. Schematic representation of the ocean biological pump. From Usbeck (1999).

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