J. F. P. Galvin - An Introduction to the Meteorology and Climate of the Tropics

1. Chapter 03
2. Chapter 04
3. Chapter 05
4. Chapter 06
5. Chapter 08
6. Chapter 09
7. Chapter 10
8. Chapter 11
9. Chapter 14
10. Appendix 07

1. Chapter 01
2. Chapter 02
3. Chapter 03
4. Chapter 04
5. Chapter 05
6. Chapter 06
7. Chapter 07
8. Chapter 08
9. Chapter 09
10. Chapter 10
11. Chapter 11
12. Chapter 12
13. Chapter 13
14. Chapter 14
15. Chapter 15
16. Chapter 16
17. Appendix 01
18. Appendix 03
19. Appendix 04
20. Appendix 05
21. Appendix 07

J F P Galvin

This edition first published 2016 2016 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Galvin, Jim (J. F. P.)
An introduction to the meteorology and climate of the tropics / Jim Galvin.
pagescm
Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-119-08622-2 (pbk.)
1.Tropical meteorology.2.TropicsClimate.I.Title.
QC993.5.G25 2016
551.50913dc23
2015020802

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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Cover image: Pacaya-Samiria Reserve, Reserva Nacional Pacaya-Samiria, Maranon River, Rio Maranon, Loreto Region, Maynas Province, Amazon Basin, Peru(The cover image is from Getty Images, number: 505330107)

To Grace, Hannah and Cecilia

J F P Galvin has spent his career with the Met Office, most of it working as an observer or forecaster of the weather in the UK and Mediterranean. He has had a long-held fascination with tropical weather and its different character.

He gained a Masters Degree in Applied Meteorology at the University of Reading in 2000, and much of the inspiration for this book has its origins in a module on tropical meteorology, studied as part of the course.

This book is updated, revised and extended from a series published in the RMetS journal Weather, of which he is now editor. The original papers were written in part as a guide for forecasters in the World-Area Forecast Centre at the Met Office, where he is a specialist meteorologist.

Between 2000 and 2006, he served as Honorary Photographic Editor on the Editorial Board of Weather and is a prolific writer on meteorology. Recently he has assisted in the production of a forecasters guide for West Africa (Parker & Diop-Kane, 2015).

He is married with two girls, and greatly enjoys photography, travel and reading novels.

In this book I describe various aspects of tropical weather and climate as it is understood today. Each chapter includes a description of the effects of tropical weather and there are several case studies included to show the effects of tropical weather.

Written as an introduction (based on a series published in the RMetS journal Weather) with an inter-disciplinary text, the emphasis is on observational science. A number of very good texts are available for those who wish to go into greater depth, including the mathematics of the tropical atmosphere; in particular, I recommend the books Climate Dynamics of the Tropics by Hastenrath (1991) and The Climate and Weather of the Tropics by Riehl (1979).

The text is aimed at readers with an interest in and at least some knowledge of meteorology or physical geography. It is intended as a background for students beginning their examination of tropical weather and climate. Readers may not be familiar with some of the diagrams discussed in the text and a guide to these appears as .

I have approached the subject as a weather forecaster, as much as possible, with the needs of fellow forecasters in mind. Computers are increasingly accurate in their analyses and prediction of weather patterns, in particular in the first few days (Met Office 2013a) and carry out mathematical calculations to formulate forecasts to a high precision. In general, the forecaster or even the researcher needs to have little more than a basic grounding in the mathematics peculiar to the weather of the tropics. In general, this is covered in foundation courses for atmospheric physics (e.g. McIlveen 1992) and so will not be revisited here.

It is far more valuable to the meteorologist to know about general patterns of weather and climate, as well as analysis within the tropics most of which are very different from those of the high latitudes. With this knowledge it is possible to add detail to the predictions from (global) models with a coarse grid length, thus adding value to the low-resolution numerical forecast product. It is also possible to assess the likelihood of some longer-range numerical forecasts. Nonetheless, there are many aspects of tropical weather that can be explained in the same way in the higher latitudes: the variation of temperature with height, the effects of continentality (or the converse, the oceans) and the effects of the radiation balance, all of which are described by universal physical equations. The atmosphere is, after all, a single entity with essentially the same constituents. For this reason, where appropriate investigations have been carried out, I have included references to the meteorology of the higher latitudes.