Applied meteorology and climatology

Abstract

The relationship between geographers and study of the atmosphere has not always been straightforward.Lingering concerns about climatic determinism, especially as espoused by Ellsworth Huntington in the early 20 th century, haunted the attempts of social scientists interested in the effects of climate on society (Rayner, 2003), while at the same time, physicists took the lead in meteorology leaving physical geographers with the perceived unscientific and rigour-lacking climatology (Koelsch, 1996).Writing in 1965 in Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Crowe (1965: 1) argued that, within geography, climatology's "... devoted adherents are few and forward progress during the last Brűckner cycle has not been noteworthy.Indeed, it could be said that climatologists have abandoned their cycles before equipping themselves with an attractive bandwagon..." How rapidly this was to shift in the context of emerging interest in global climatic changes from the 1970s onwards!Despite the arguably limited quantity, geographers and other social scientists had explored many interesting questions about weather, climate and society.For example, urban climatologists, like Tony Chandler, explored the design of urban spaces and their influence on local climatic patterns, a field that has been somewhat sidelined in the rush to ascribe causal power to global rather than local climatic changes (Janković and Hebbert, 2012), though of course exceptions exist especially as related to air pollution.In the 1960s and early 1970s there was a spate of influential applied climatology/climatology text books and edited volumes from climatologists such as John Griffiths (1966), Roger Barry and Richard Chorley (1968), James Taylor (1970;1972;1974), David Gates (1972), John Oliver (1973), John Mather (1974), Tim Oke (1978) and John Hobbs (1980).One of the key academic papers at this time was by Werner Terjung (1976) who envisaged a new form of geographical climatology, operationalized through systems theory, to combine both physical and human geography approaches to solve real world problems.Outside of geography, John Maunder (1970; 1989) explored climatic resources and their value for and impact on economic activity and Mikhail Budyko (1974) published the seminal Climate and Life.These texts, advanced in the 1960s and 1970s, developed an atmospheric resource and hazard approach showing that these relations were rarely simple, but had important consequences for weather-sensitive industries.Indeed, far-sighted companies could improve their economic value with strategic responses to weather forecasts.

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