Weather, Macroweather, and the Climate: Our Random Yet Predictable Atmosphere

Weather, Macroweather, and the Climate: Our Random Yet Predictable Atmosphere
ISBN-10
0190864230
ISBN-13
9780190864231
Category
Science
Pages
304
Language
English
Published
2019-03-19
Publisher
Oxford University Press
Author
Shaun Lovejoy

Description

Weather, Macroweather, and the Climate is an insider's attempt to explain as simply as possible how to understand the atmospheric variability that occurs over an astonishing range of scales: from millimeters to the size of the planet, from milliseconds to billions of years. The variability is so large that standard ways of dealing with it are utterly inadequate: in 2015, it was found that classical approaches had underestimated the variability by the astronomical factor of a quadrillion (a million billion). Author Shaun Lovejoy asks - and answers - many fundamental questions such as: Is the atmosphere random or deterministic? What is turbulence? How big is a cloud (what is the appropriate notion of size itself)? What is its dimension? How can we conceptualize the structures within structures within structures spanning millimeters to thousands of kilometers and milliseconds to the age of the planet? What is weather? What is climate? Lovejoy shows in simple terms why the industrial epoch warming can't be natural - much simpler than trying to show that it's anthropogenic. We will discuss in simple terms how to make the best seasonal and annual forecasts - without giant numerical models. Above all, the book offers readers a new understanding of the atmosphere.

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