ABSTRACT
Regional climatology involves the description of climates over selected areas of the surface of the planet earth. In the past it has depended heavily upon accumulated conventional observations of surface weather elements, such as temperature, humidity, cloudiness, sunshine, rainfall and wind. Synoptic climatology involves the study of general weather characteristics through their relationships with patterns of airflow, or ‘airflow types’ as they have become known. Such analyses depend more on the categorization of pressure map patterns than upon analyses of the more traditional climatic statistics. G. R. Rumney writes that ‘physical climatology has developed through the last one hundred years to describe, classify and explain the highly complex and eternally variable relationships among the many qualities of the atmosphere’. H. E. Landsberg, at the outset of his survey of this field, observed that ‘the field of climatology was being pre-empted by the geographical approach. The chapter also presents an overview on the key concepts discussed in this book.
