Climatic atlas of the Tropical Atlantic and the Eastern Pacific Oceans: Stefan Hastenrath and Peter J. Lamb. University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, Wisc., 1977, 100 pp.
✍ Scribed by Richard E. Felch
- Publisher
- Elsevier Science
- Year
- 1980
- Weight
- 136 KB
- Volume
- 21
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0002-1571
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
The role of the oceans in shaping the earth's climate is becoming increasingly apparent. However, the task of trying to measure "ocean climate" is very difficult. This atlas deals with various aspects of the climatology of the tropical Atlantic and eastern Pacific Oceans through a series of 97 charts and 8 tables. The charts are subdivided into a section on kinematics and dynamics and a section on Thermodynamics. The section on kinematics and dynamics includes monthly charts of sea level pressure, resultant wind and divergence. Directional steadiness of wind, vorticity and curl of wind stress are presented for January, April, July and October. In the thermodynamics section, monthly charts are given for sea surface temperature, total cloudiness and precipitation frequency. Sea-air temperature difference, specific humidity and low cloud observations are given for the four selected months indicated above. A series of 8 tables are used to present some measure of climatic variability for January and July observations of sea level pressure, resultant wind speed, sea surface temperature, and total cloudiness.
The data used to prepare the maps and tables were taken from the TDF-11 data set of the National Climatic Center of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (USA). This data set is a compilation of 17 different data sets, the oldest going back to 1854. However, only the data for the period 1911--1970 were used in this work. The data have been summarized or grouped on the basis of 1 ° grids. The number of observations for the 60-year record per grid range from something less than 100 to over 10,000 along the regularly traveled shipping routes. This means that many grid areas have averages of less than two observations per year. For each calendar month and individual 1 ° square, observations were averaged over the entire 60-year period, each observation carrying equal weight. The resulting 60-year mean fields were then smoothed by an objective filtering procedure designed by R. Bleck. This method was selected because it is relatively insensitive to the variation of the area of different latitude zones. "The filtered maps preserve the essential signature of the raw pattern even for regions of strong gradients such as in sea surface temperature."
The authors make a very significant statement about this atlas. "It is hoped that it may provide a background climatology for students of meteorology, climatology, and oceanography, and that it may also find a