The Ceaseless Wind: An Introduction to the Theory of Atmospheric Motion

Abstract

When this book was first published in 1976; it consisted, like Gaul, of three parts, one setting out the basic mathematical and physical concepts that are used in atmospheric dynamics, another constructing the necessary equations, and a third discussing the application of the equations to the atmosphere. In this new paperback edition the author has added a chapter on mathematical modeling of the atmosphere, and he has taken the opportunity to make some corrections and revisions. There have been many advances in meteorology in the decade since publication of the first edition, but this edition includes hardly any of them. This is essentially a book about theorectical rather than observational meteorology, so perhaps it is understandable that no account is given of recent satellite data for the stratosphere or for the southern hemisphere. However, to read the sections on the global energy budget, one might think that the Global Weather Experiment had never taken place. Only a few theoretical topics have been added, while others, such as cyclogenesis, have been left unaltered, with the result that what little attention they receive seems to be distinctly old‐fashioned. The new material at the end of the book includes a study of the possible flow regimes of the (global) atmosphere. This starts out in promising fashion and sets up some useful working approximations, but instead of going on to apply these in real situations, the discussion turns away to examine a set of canonical equations that owes as much to statistical mechanics as to meteorology. These additions are not made any easier to appreciate by the rather baffling decision to add an extra index for the new chapter. The reader may now have the pleasure of looking u p one subject in two indexes before discovering that it was never there in the first place.