The tropics and their role in the global climate system.

Anomalous weather events have far-reaching impacts which are of interest to researchers in a variety of disciplines. It has become increasingly popular, but not necessarily justifiable, to trace regional weather effects over all parts of the globe to origins in the tropics. This paper intends to show how, over the past 15 years, results from traditional observational studies and general circulation model (GCM) climate simulations have combined to promote rapid advances in our knowledge of how the tropics may affect weather and climate over the rest of the planet. It is suggested that the direction of future research will be greatly influenced by new observational and modelling programmes such as the Tropical Ocean Global Atmosphere Programme (TOGA) and the introduction of the next generation of coupled ocean-atmosphere climate models. Taken together, these observational and modelling studies should fill many gaps in our existing knowledge of the tropics and global climate over the next 15 years. -Author