The Great Courses Meteorology

Why is it often cooler by the ocean? What conditions cause a rainforest? What makes the sky blue? Explore the Mystery and Intrigue behind the Weather. Weather affects your life every day. From the transformation of water vapor into clouds to the swirling winds of a tornado, meteorological events are the result of intricate interactions between powerful forces around you.

Why is it often cooler by the ocean? What conditions cause a rainforest? What makes the sky blue? Explore the Mystery and Intrigue behind the Weather. Weather affects your life every day. From the transformation of water vapor into clouds to the swirling winds of a tornado, meteorological events are the result of intricate interactions between powerful forces around you.

Energy is, without a doubt, the very foundation of the universe. It’s the engine that powers life and fuels the evolution of human civilization.

Energy is, without a doubt, the very foundation of the universe. It’s the engine that powers life and fuels the evolution of human civilization.

This book originates from the translation of an Italian textbook on the physics and chemistry of the atmosphere. The idea for this earlier effort came to me after I published, in 1989, "L' Atmosfera", a popular science book. A few years later I discovered, to my great surprise, that it was adopted as a textbook by a few univer­ sities or university courses. The publication of the book coincided with the intro­ duction in Italy of a university curriculum on Environmental Science and a partial reform of the physics curriculum that allows the teaching of courses like Atmos­ pheric Physics, Meteorology and Environmental Physics.

The book is a practical manual which has been created to support the syllabus of agro-meteorology courses specifically designed for graduate and post-graduate students. The topics covered in the manual include working with meteorological instruments for measurement of various meteorological parameters like temperature, humidity, sunshine hours, precipitation, etc.