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Principles of ary Climate
This book introduces the reader to all the basic physical building blocks of climate needed to understand
the present and past climate of Earth, the climates of Solar System s, and the climates of the newly
discovered extrasolar s. These building blocks include thermodynamics, infrared radiative transfer,
scattering, surface heat transfer, and various processes governing the evolution of position.
General phenomena such as Snowball Earth states, habitability zones, and the Runaway Greenhouse are
used to illustrate the interplay of the basic building blocks of physics. The reader will also acquire a quanti-
tative understanding of such key problems as the Faint Young Sun, the nature of Titan’s cold liquid-methane
hydrological cycle, and the warm, wet Early Mars climate, in addition to phenomena related to anthro-
pogenic global warming on Earth, Earth’s glacial–interglacial cycles, and their analogs on other s.
Exploration of simple analytical solutions is used throughout as a means to build the intuition needed to
interpret the behavior of plex phenomena requiring numerical simulation. Where numerical sim-
ulation is necessary, all necessary algorithms are developed in the text, and implemented in user-modifiable
software modules supplied in the online supplement to the book. Nearly 400 problems are supplied to
help consolidate the reader’s understanding, and to lead the reader towards original research on ary
climate.
This textbook is invaluable for advanced undergraduate or beginning graduate students in atmospheric
science, Earth and ary science, astrobiology, and physics. It also provides a superb reference text
for researchers in these subjects, and is very suitable for academic researchers trained in physics or chem-
istry who wish to rapidly gain enough background to participate in the excitement of the new research
opportunities opening in ary climate.
R AYMOND T. PIERREHUMBER