E-Book Overview
YUH-LANG LIN is a professor in the Department of Marine, Earth, and Atmospheric Sciences at North Carolina State University. His research in mesoscale dynamics and modelling includes moist convection, orographic effects on airflow and weather systems, gravity waves, tropical, lee and coastal cyclogeneses, and modelling of the martian atmosphere.
E-Book Content
This page intentionally left blank MESOSCALE DYNAMICS Mesoscale weather systems are responsible for numerous natural disasters, such as damaging winds, blizzards, and flash flooding. A fundamental understanding of the underlying dynamics involved in these weather systems is essential in forecasting their occurrence. This book provides a systematic approach to this subject, and covers a more complete spectrum of mesoscale dynamics than other texts. The opening chapters introduce the basic equations governing mesoscale weather systems and their approximations. The subsequent chapters cover four major areas of mesoscale dynamics: wave dynamics, moist convection, front dynamics, and mesoscale modeling. Wave dynamics covers wave generation and maintenance, orographically forced flow, and thermally forced flow. The moist convection part covers mesoscale instabilities, isolated storms, mesoscale convective systems, orographic precipitation, and introduces tropical cyclone dynamics. The dynamics of synoptic-scale fronts, mesoscale fronts, and jet streaks are discussed in the front dynamics part. The last part of the book introduces basic numerical modeling techniques, parameterizations of major physical processes, and the foundation for mesoscale numerical weather prediction. Mesoscale Dynamics is an ideal reference on this topic for researchers in meteorology and atmospheric science. This book could also serve as a textbook for graduate students, and it contains over 100 problems, with password-protected so