Thesis (M. S.)--Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, Georgia Institute of Technology, 2009. / Committee Chair: Rong Fu; Committee Member: Robert Dickinson; Committee Member: Robert X. Black. Part of the SMARTech Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Collection.

Tropical forests play a key role in determining the global carbon-climate feedback in the 21st century. Changes in rainforest growth and mortality rates, especially in the deep and least perturbed forest areas, have been consistently observed across global tropics in recent decades. Understanding the underlying causes of these changes, especially their links to the global climate change, is especially important in determining the future of the tropical rainforests in the 21st century. Previous studies have mostly focused on the potential influences from elevated atmospheric CO2 and increasing surface temperature. Because the rainforests in wet tropical region are often light limited, we explore whether cloudiness have changed, and if so, whether it is consistent with what is expected from changes in forest growth rate.