Some stolid educators believe that the mind is like a cup and that only "fluff"
prevents it from being filled with pearls of knowledge. Motivated by this philosophy,
they present basic meteorology as an encyclopedia whose entries must be memorized
and mastered.
We believe that the mind is more like a sieve which, unless enough "fluff"
is added, the pearls of knowledge are filled and filled but never retained. It is
this model of the human mind that motivated us to take great care in creating this
new edition. By interjecting cultural allusions, anecdotes, and, yes, even humor to
act as "fluff," we firmly believe that students will retain pearls of knowledge
about meteorology long after the course has ended.
For example, in order to explain the lag in temperature between the summer
solstice and the warmest time of the year in July and early August, one elementary
text, which took an encyclopedic approach to presenting meteorology, states that
"the troposphere's temperature takes time to adjust to the changing solar energy
input." In this textbook, we take an alternative approach, using the anecdote
of heating up cold pizza in a preheated oven to teach the notion of seasonal lag.
Yes, we readily admit that the "fluff" of connecting the idea of heating cold
pizza in an oven to the summer lag in temperature requires words that stolid
educators maintain are a waste of time and space. We submit, however, that, by
appealing to an experience common to students' lives, they will retain this
pearl of knowledge long after all encyclopedic explanations fade from memory.
Though invoking cold pizza may lend the impression that this textbook
forsakes scientific rigor for metaphor and anecdote, rest assured that it does
not. For example, the occlusion of a mid-latitude low pressure system is usually
described as the process by which "the cold front catches up with the warm front."
For the first time in an elementary text book, we will show that it is the
reshuffling of upper-air divergence that causes occlusion to occur, rendering
the tired explanation of occlusion as the "cold front catching up to the warm
front" as merely an effect rather than a cause.
A World of Weather
is a textbook. It is also a laboratory manual.
Real-life examples and non-traditional problems that use weather data from
previous storms support our hands-on approach. These exercises make our book
a valuable teaching tool for introductory courses at both large and small
universities, including colleges that do not have a meteorology program and
offer only one course in weather. Though the text is streamlined for college
students with a non-meteorology major, we firmly believe that
A World of Weather
will also serve as a well-rounded foundation for students intending
to major in meteorology.
Fundamentally, we want students to be good weather consumers. They
will be bombarded by all types of weather information throughout their lives
via television, the internet, radio and the written word. Some of it will be
scientifically accurate; some of it will be fuzzy and misleading. In order to
discriminate between accurate and misleading information, students will need
to retain what they learned about basic meteorology.
We believe that our textbook will give students life-long pearls of
knowledge.