ABSTRACT
Meteorological theory rests upon the basic laws of physics and hydrodynamics, and climatology, treating the seasonal characteristics of weather phenomena over specific areas in terms of general relationships between the atmosphere and the earth’s surface, is dependent on the fundamentals of meteorology. In consequence climatological models are primarily statistical while those of meteorology are physical-mathematical, although the two approaches are by no means mutually exclusive. Since much research effort during the past twenty years has been devoted to problems of the global air circulation the principal themes of this chapter are ‘dynamic climatology’ (Bergeron, 1930; Court, 1957; Huschke, 1959) which deals with large-scale atmospheric circulations and synoptic-scale models which are a necessary adjunct for the understanding of global patterns. Models equally have their place, however, in bioclimatology and physical climatology and some important aspects of the latter are discussed in Chapter 5.
