Meteorology and climatology

The impact of climate on human activities and the effect of humans on cli- mate are two of the most important areas of inquiry in climatology.

PREFACE ix ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xi L.

Global climate change is expected to have major impacts on water resources and aquatic ecosystems.

Aquatic systems play a salient role in the complex processes of energy and matter exchange between the geosphere and the atmosphere.

The journal Boundary-Layer Meteorology was started in 1970 and has become the premier vehicle for the publication of research papers in its field.

The thermodynamics of the atmosphere is the subject of several chapters in most textbooks on dynamic meteorology, but there is no work in English to give the subject a specific and more extensive treatment.

Present policy issues concern the reduction of ozone levels by controlling its precursors, NOx and volatile organic compounds (VOC).

International concern for the continued growth of greenhouse gas emissions, and the potentially damaging consequences of resultant global climate change, led to the signing of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change by 155 nations at the Earth Summit in June 1992.

Remote sensing of the environment is covered through spectroscopic analysis of soil and vegetation response during active and passive sensing.

Global pesticide use is currently estimated at approximately 2.

The idea for this book was born at the June 1996 meeting of the IDEAL Steering Committee in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Since the pioneering work of Shannon in the late 1940's on the development of the theory of entropy and the landmark contributions of Jaynes a decade later leading to the development of the principle of maximum entropy (POME), the concept of entropy has been increasingly applied in a wide spectrum of areas, including chemistry, electronics and communications engineering, data acquisition and storage and retreival, data monitoring network design, ecology, economics, environmental engineering, earth sciences, fluid mechanics, genetics, geology, geomorphology, geophysics, geotechnical engineering, hydraulics, hydrology, image processing, management sciences, operations research, pattern recognition and identification, photogrammetry, psychology, physics and quantum mechanics, reliability analysis, reservoir engineering, statistical mechanics, thermodynamics, topology, transportation engineering, turbulence modeling, and so on.

The phenomenon of evaporation in the natural environment is of interest in various diverse disciplines.

The last decade of this century has seen a renewed interest in the dynamics and physics of the small bodies of the Solar System, Asteroids, Comets and Meteors.

Over the past decade the scientific activities of the Joint Global Ocean Flux Study (JGOFS), which focuses on the role of the oceans in controlling climate change via the transport and storage of greenhouse gases and organic matter, have led to an increased interest in the study of the biogeochemistry of organic matter.

This book is based on a workshop on biogeography of freshwater algae held during the Fifth International Phycological Congress in China 1994.

The Brahmaputra River is a precious gift of Nature to India and especially to its northeast region.

The history of scientific research and technological development is replete with examples of breakthroughs that have advanced the frontiers of knowledge, but seldom does it record events that constitute paradigm shifts in broad areas of intellectual pursuit.

th Towards the end of the 19 century some researchers put forward the hypothesis that the Polar regions may play the key role in the shaping of the global climate.

The interaction between environmental change and human activities is com- plex, requiring the concepts and tools of a number of disciplines for its effective analysis.

As we all know, weather radar came into existence during the Second World War when aircraft detection radars had their vision limited by echoes from rain bearing clouds.

Turbulence theory is one of the most intriguing parts of fluid mechanics and many outstanding scientists have tried to apply their knowledge to the development of the theory and to offer useful recommendations for solution of some practical problems.

Aerobiology is the science that studies the biological component of the atmosphere and its effects on living systems and on the environment.

Flood Problem and Management in South Asia focuses on both the hazard and the vulnerability aspects of floods.

After World War II, Professor S.

Because of its centrallocation in the Old World, the Adriatic Sea has long been explored and studied.

This Volume constitutes the Proceedings of the IUTAM Symposium on 'Scaling Laws in Ice Mechanics and Ice Dynamics', held in Fairbanks, Alaska from 13th to 16th of June 2000.

This anthology of studies by the eminent geographer and climate scientist Eduard Bruckner (1862-1927) on anthropogenic climate change and the social, political and economic impact of climate variations on societies in historical times, assembles his pioneering work in English for the first time.

Climate change is one of the major global environmental problems, one that has the potential to confront us with great costs during the decades to come.

Drought is one of the major natural hazards, resulting in significant economic, social, and environmental costs.

In this book, the methodology of dynamical systems theory is applied to investigate the physics of the global ocean circulation.

Reducing the cost of space program interests people more and more nowadays due to the concerns of budget limitation and commercialization of space technology.

Climate variability has major impacts in many parts of the world, including Australia.

In the climate change discussion, non-CO2 greenhouse gases (NCGGs) received official political recognition for the first time in 1997, when agreement was reached on the Kyoto Protocol.

Bangladesh faces many challenges.

During the 1980's a wealth of information was reported from field and laboratory experiments in order to validate andlor modify various aspects of the surface layer Monin-Obukhov (M-O) similarity theory for use over the sea, and to introduce and test new concepts related to high resolution flux magnitudes and variabilities.

Are extreme weather events becoming more common?

A multidecadal cooling is known to have occurred in Europe in the final decades of the sixteenth-century.

Mongolia is an expansive land-locked country, tilted by tectonic forces to the North, that experiences extremes of continental climate.

Since 1950 the population of the world has more than doubled, and the proportion of people living in cities has increased by a factor of four.

These are exciting times for exobiology.

This book provides a unique, in-depth view of past, present and potential future climatic change in mountain regions, and in particular on the mechanisms which are responsible for this change.

An up-to-date summary of our understanding of the dynamics and thermodynamics of moist atmospheric convection, with a strong focus on recent developments in the field.

Climate varies on all scales of time and space, bya large variety of reasons.

Dams are constructed for economic development, and their construction involves large investments of money, and natural and human resources.

One of the first priority areas among joint East/West research programs is the rational use of natural resources and sustainable development of regions.

The contents of this volume reflect to a large extent the efforts made by a group of Institutes at the ETH Zurich to develop new techniques for measurements of flows in fluids in the last decade.