Description
The atmosphere is the most dynamic of all Earth’s spheres. In no other realm do events routinely unfold so quickly, with so great a potential impact on humans. Some of the most striking atmospheric disturbances (such as tornadoes) can take place over time scales on the order of minutes—but nevertheless have permanent consequences. Events such as the California drought, which began in 2011 and showed no signs of abatement by mid-2014, take longer, but can have much more widespread effects. Water levels have dropped precipitously in reservoirs, the state’s huge agricultural industry has been severely impacted, water allocations have been reduced, and many areas have been threatened by unusually danger-ous wildfires. While catastrophes such as this are momentous, even the most mundane of atmospheric phenomena influence our lives on a daily basis (for instance, the beauty of blue skies or red sunsets, rain, or the daily cycle of temperature).
Atmospheric processes, despite their immediacy on a per-sonal level and their importance in human affairs on a larger level, are not readily understood by most people. This is prob-ably not surprising, given that the atmosphere consists pri-marily of invisible gases, along with suspended, frequently microscopic particles, water droplets, and ice crystals.
Understanding Weather and Climate is a college-level text intended for both science majors and nonmajors taking their first course in atmospheric science. We have attempted to write a text that is informative, timely, engaging to students, and easily used by professors. In this book, our overriding goal is to bridge the gap between abstract explanatory processes and the expression of those processes in everyday events. We have written the book so that students with little or no science background will be able to build a nonmathematical understanding of the atmosphere.
That said, we do not propose to abandon the foundations of physical science. We know from our own teaching experience that physical laws and principles can be mastered by students of widely varying backgrounds. In addition, we believe one of meteorology’s great advantages is that reasoning from fundamental principles explains so much of the field. Com-pared to some other disciplines, this is one in which there is an enormous payoff for mastering a relatively small number of basic ideas.
Finally, our experience is that students are always excited to learn the “why” of things, and to do so gives real meaning to “what” and “where.” For us, therefore, the idea of forsaking explanation in favor of a purely descriptive approach has no appeal whatsoever. Rather, we propose merely to replace mathematical proof (corroboration by formal argument) with qualitative reasoning and appeal to everyday occurrences. As the title implies, the goal remains understanding atmospheric behavior.