Atmospheric Science/Meteorology Resources

AI Thread Summary
The discussion provides a comprehensive list of valuable online resources for atmospheric science and meteorology, including textbooks, historical data sites, and educational materials. Key resources mentioned include The Weather Prediction website, NOAA's climate data, and the CESM model for atmospheric modeling. Additional recommendations include course materials from leading universities like the University of Washington and MIT, as well as various Q&A platforms and scientific publications. The conversation emphasizes the importance of a multidisciplinary approach, integrating physics, chemistry, and computer science into the study of atmospheric phenomena. Overall, these resources serve as essential tools for students and professionals in the field.
Simfish
Gold Member
Messages
811
Reaction score
2
http://www.theweatherprediction.com/

http://stratus.astr.ucl.ac.be/textbook/contents.html (Introduction to Climate Dynamics and Climate Modelling - free online textbook)

http://wunderground.com, http://www.weatherspark.com, http://www.wrcc.dri.edu/ => good for historical data for any particular station. Wunderground has the highest number of stations

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/ncdc.html => very good for US climate historical data

http://www.quora.com/Meteorology/ => Another weather Q&A site

http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/publications_and_data.shtml => IPCC reports

http://faculty.washington.edu/dcatling/publications.html, http://www.geosc.psu.edu/~jfk4/PersonalPage/Kasting.htm => Amazing papers on atmospheric evolution and how this is relevant for astrobiology, from two leading researchers in the field

http://www.cesm.ucar.edu/ => CESM model, webpage for one of the most common models used in atmospheric science

http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/earth-atmospheric-and-planetary-sciences/, http://www.atmos.uw.edu/academics/classes.shtml => Course webpages from two leading departments in the area. Personally, I prefer the ones from UW, as they're more open access (and MIT OCW cuts out a lot of useful material)

=> Amazon list of Atmospheric Science textbooks. Incomplete though, so I may have to create a list when I have more time

http://graduate-school.phds.org/ran...____________________________________________U => NRC Rankings of Atmospheric Science departments (and other related departments). Good for finding universities with good course webpages.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Mathematics news on Phys.org
Last edited:
Meted-lots of educational resources on a variety of meteorology/geoscience topics, and it even has quizzes.
 
http://rst.gsfc.nasa.gov/Front/tofc.html => NASA Remote Sensing Tutorial (more Earth science than atmospheric science, but still useful)

http://www.ccrs.nrcan.gc.ca/resource/tutor/fundam/index_e.php => another remote sensing tutorial
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Finally created my Amazon.com guide: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/R1IN1WJB8C/?tag=pfamazon01-20

Sample text here:

So, this list of textbooks is very close to the list of textbooks that the University of Washington uses (the UW has one of the top Atmospheric Science programs in the nation). I've also included some supplementary material that I've felt helpful in my study. You can find a list of course webpages at http://www.atmos.washington.edu/academics/classes.shtml. Some courses use a lot of course notes (one example is http://www.atmos.washington.edu/~dennis/552.index.html).

I'm also adding some planetary science textbooks as I feel that these can really enhance one's understanding of Earth's atmosphere. For a full understanding of the material, you should also study some physics, chemistry, Earth science, and get a working knowledge of MATLAB + some computer science and basic electrical engineering.

Undergrad Books:

Atmospheric Science, Second Edition: An Introductory Survey (International Geophysics)
An Introduction to Dynamic Meteorology, Fourth Edition (The International Geophysics Series, Vol 88)
Global Physical Climatology, Volume 56 (International Geophysics)
A Climate Modelling Primer
Planetary Atmospheres
Introduction to Atmospheric Chemistry
A First Course in Atmospheric Radiation (2nd Ed.)
Introduction to Micrometeorology, Volume 79, Second Edition (International Geophysics)

Graduate level books:
Atmospheric and Oceanic Fluid Dynamics: Fundamentals and Large-scale Circulation
An Introduction to Planetary Atmospheres
Cloud Dynamics, Volume 53 (International Geophysics)
Fluid Mechanics with Multimedia DVD, Fourth Edition
Numerical Methods for Fluid Dynamics: With Applications to Geophysics (Texts in Applied Mathematics)

Math background books:

An Introduction to Atmospheric Radiation, Volume 84, Second Edition (International Geophysics)
Nonlinear Dynamics And Chaos: With Applications To Physics, Biology, Chemistry, And Engineering (Studies in Nonlinearity)
Applied Partial Differential Equations (4th Edition)
Fundamentals of Complex Analysis with Applications to Engineering, Science, and Mathematics (3rd Edition)
Elementary Differential Equations

Also, this book is awesome even if it isn't a textbook:

How to Find a Habitable Planet (Science Essentials)
 
Last edited by a moderator:
http://www.annualreviews.org/journal/earth

http://www.annualreviews.org/journal/fluid

Annual Reviews (the papers here are a lot more readable than the papers in most journals - they just give a summary of what was hot in the past year)
 
http://geosci.uchicago.edu/~rtp1/PrinciplesPlanetaryClimate/Data/dataPortal.html => Data sources for Principles of Planetary Climate. I'll just quote it here:

National Climate Data Center. Hosts a wide variety of instrumental climate data as well as paleoclimate data. The datasets here tend to be for individual stations or sediment or ice cores, rather than gridded data. This is a good source of weather balloon soundings as well as historical surface station data. It is also a good place to look for ice core and marine sediment core data.
National Geophysical Data Center Ocean Drilling Core Site. The comprehensive site for Deep Sea Drilling Project data.
NOAA Earth Systems Research Laboratory collection of gridded climate datasets. This includes a wide variety of atmospheric and oceanic data sets on latitude/longitude grids (or lat/lon/pressure for 3D atmospheric datasets). Includes many satellite-derived products. The NCEP gridded reanalyis product, giving temperature, winds, moisture, etc. at the surface and as a function of height is available here. Most of these datasets are in the netCDF file format, which can be read into Python using a variety of add-on modules, notably PyNio, which can be obtained and installed similarly to PyNGL.
NASA GISSTemp surface temperature record (based on surface station data).
RSS Microwave Satellite Temperature dataset. A key dataset for analysis of temperature trends, going back to about 1980.
CDIAC (Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center). Data related to carbon dioxide concentrations and emissions.
Mauna Loa Observatory carbon dioxide records.

Absorption data,spectroscopy, optical properties

HITRAN line database. The comprehensive authoritative source for the latest information on infrared spectroscopy. Go here to get the most up-to-date version of the database.
Borysow tables and programs characterizing the collision-induced continuum absorption for H2, CO2, N2 and various other gases. The H2-H2 continuum was not discussed in Chapter 4 of the text, but you can find it here. The CO2 continuum described in these tables is believed to be more accurate than the Pollack/Kasting formulation currently used in the text and the homebrew radiation code. When the time for the second revision of the book comes around, I will probably replace Pollack/Kasting with Borysow. The discussion of the various N2 continua in the text, based on Courtin, is still more or less state-of-the art for the Titan regime, but the corresponding tables and programs at the Borysow site may be easier to use. At some point I will download this date, put it in the standard units used in the book, and merge it into the Chapter 4 Workbook Datasets.
MPI-Mainz UV and visible gaseous absorption
A complilation of various sources on optical properties of condensed water can be found here . The Warren (1984) data used in the text (first edition) is linked in this complilation. Note that Warren (1984) has been updated by Warren and Brandt (2008). The paper and updated data tables can be found here.
OPA Optical properties of aerosols This is a great source for index of refraction of sulfate aerosols and various other aerosols, but its location seems to be a bit unstable. The lead custodian of the site seems to be C.E.L. Myhre, and if the site disappears again, you can try searching under that name.
 

Hot Threads

Recent Insights

Back
Top