| Summary: | The observations are our starting point in this book, having been obtained from research aircraft in the last two decades. Justification for this approach can be found in Section 1.3 and by noting that there are no known analytical solutions to the Navier–Stokes equation, preventing the possibility of a priori prediction of the atmosphere’s turbulent structure. We note the pioneering power spectral analysis of wind, temperature, and ozone from commercial Boeing 747 aircraft (Nastrom and Gage 1985) and the more recent data from Airbus 340 aircraft under the aegis of the MOZAIC programme (Marenco et al. 1998). Multifractal analysis was first applied to observations from an IL-12 aircraft in the tropics (Chigirinskaya et al. 1994) and has been applied to a large body of observations taken from ER- 2, WB57F, DC-8, and G4 aircraft, with dropsondes from the last of these; Chapters 2, 4 and 5 are largely devoted to the results. Many of these data were obtained in the lower stratosphere from the ER-2 in the course of investigating ozone loss in both Arctic and Antarctic regions, where there exists a reasonably well-defined, durable circulation system offering clear dynamical, chemical, and radiative signatures. A more climate-driven imperative exists to investigate the tropical upper troposphere and lower stratosphere, largely pursued with the WB57F. The recent G4 and dropsonde data were acquired in the troposphere over the eastern Pacific Ocean, in the course of investigating northern hemisphere winter storms there. The utility of balloons and then, 120 years later, from 1903, of powered aircraft for exploring atmospheric properties, were immediately obvious. The Second World War saw aircraft attaining stratospheric altitudes, revealing a very dry lower stratosphere with westerly winds in winter and easterlies in summer, with accumulation of high ozone abundances in polar regions (Brewer 1944; Dobson et al. 1945; Brewer et al. 1948; Brewer 1949; Murgatroyd and Clews 1949; Bannon et al. 1952).
|
|---|