Introduction

Abstract

This chapter gives a quick sketch of some of the material to be covered in this book. We start in Section 1.1 with an outline of some of the more important physical processes that occur in the Earth's atmosphere. To interpret atmospheric observations we need to develop physical and mathematical models; they are briefly discussed in Section 1.2. Two extremely simple models are introduced in Section 1.3: the second of these includes a very basic representation of the greenhouse effect. In Section 1.4 we present a selection of observations of atmospheric processes, together with simple physical explanations for some of them. In Section 1.5 we briefly mention some ideas on weather and climate.