Dataset: Descriptions of hurricanes affecting St. John

Based on Tsounis and Edmunds (In press), Ecosphere: 

Physical environmental conditions were characterized using three features that are well-known to affect coral reef community dynamics (described in Glynn 1993, Rogers 1993, Fabricius et al. 2005): seawater temperature, rainfall, and hurricane intensity. Together, these were used to generate seven dependent variables describing physical environmental features. Seawater temperature was recorded at each site every 15-30 min using a variety of logging sensors (see Edmunds 2006 for detailed information on the temperature measurement regime). Seawater temperature was characterized using five dependent variables calculated for each calendar year: mean temperature, maximum temperature, and minimum temperature (all averaged by day and month for each year), as well as the number of days hotter than 29.3 deg C (“hot days”), and the number of days with temperatures greater than or equal to 26.0 deg C (“cold days”). The temperature defining "hot days" was determined by the coral bleaching threshold for St. John (http://www.coral.noaa.gov/research/climate-change/coral-bleaching.html), and the temperature defining "cold days" was taken as 26.0 deg C which marks the lower 12th percentile of all daily temperatures between 1989 and 2005 (Edmunds, 2006). The upper temperature limit was defined by the local bleaching threshold, and the lower limit defined the 12th percentile of local seawater temperature records (see Edmunds 2006 for details). Rainfall was measured at various locations around St. John (see http://www.sercc.com) but often on the north shore (courtesy of R. Boulon) (see Edmunds and Gray 2014). To assess the influence of hurricanes, a categorical index of local hurricane impact was employed, with the index based on qualitative estimates of wave impacts in Great Lameshur Bay as a function of wind speed, wind direction, and distance of the nearest approach of each hurricane to the study area (see Gross and Edmunds 2015). Index values of 0 were assigned to years with no hurricanes, 0.5 to hurricanes with low impacts, and 1 for hurricanes with high impacts, and years were characterized by the sum of their hurricane index values.