Weather as a fluid dynamics problem with a forecast horizon.
9 topics · 12 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
JetStream: An Online School for Weather
National Weather Service · 2010
Walks a general reader through why weather happens at all — energy balance, fronts, pressure systems, storms — before any of the maths, as the…
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
Cloud Pictures from Satellite TIROS I
Sigmund Fritz & Harry Wexler · 1960
Presents the first cloud photographs taken from an orbiting weather satellite and shows forecasters could already read storm structure from them,…
+2 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
Life Cycle of Cyclones and the Polar Front Theory of Atmospheric Circulation
Jacob Bjerknes & Halvor Solberg · 1922
Describes a mid-latitude storm as a wave running along the boundary between cold and warm air masses, born, maturing and occluding in a repeatable…
+7 more at this level
12 works
National Weather Service
Walks a general reader through why weather happens at all — energy balance, fronts, pressure systems, storms — before any of the maths, as the on-ramp NWS built for its own forecasters-in-training and the public alike.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Sigmund Fritz & Harry Wexler
Presents the first cloud photographs taken from an orbiting weather satellite and shows forecasters could already read storm structure from them, proof that meteorology had gained a genuinely new observing instrument.
link failing as of 17 Sept 2026Daniel J. Jacob
Builds atmospheric chemistry from mass-balance box models rather than a survey of pollutants, so a reader learns to derive the concentration of any species in the atmosphere rather than memorise a list of them.
Ron Smith (YaleCourses)
Treats climate as a physics problem — radiation balance, fluid circulation, ocean heat transport — so that projections follow from conservation laws rather than from correlation.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Jacob Bjerknes & Halvor Solberg
Describes a mid-latitude storm as a wave running along the boundary between cold and warm air masses, born, maturing and occluding in a repeatable sequence rather than a random pressure event.
Carl-Gustaf Rossby
Derives the wave equation for the large horizontal undulations of the jet stream, showing their speed depends on wavelength and latitude — the paper that gave Rossby waves their name and their physics.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Bernard Vonnegut
Identifies silver iodide's crystal structure as close enough to ice to trigger freezing in supercooled cloud droplets, the discovery that made deliberate cloud seeding possible.
Jule Charney, Ragnar Fjørtoft & John von Neumann
Produces the first computer-generated weather forecast from a simplified atmospheric equation, proving numerical weather prediction was computationally possible at all.
link failing as of 17 Sept 2026T. Theodore Fujita
Proposes a six-step damage-based intensity scale for tornadoes, tied to windspeed estimates from what the wind destroyed, and it became the F-scale used for decades afterward.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Joost A. Businger, John C. Wyngaard, Yeshpal Izumi & Edwin F. Bradley
Fits wind and temperature gradients measured over Kansas farmland to Monin-Obukhov similarity theory, giving the empirical constants boundary-layer models still use to relate surface fluxes to profiles above them.
link failing as of 17 Sept 2026Mario J. Molina & F. Sherwood Rowland
Predicts that CFCs, inert everywhere else, reach the stratosphere intact and there catalytically destroy ozone one chlorine atom at a time, the paper that built the scientific case against CFCs a decade before the Antarctic hole was found.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Sean Twomey
Shows that adding aerosol particles to a cloud of fixed liquid-water content must make it reflect more sunlight by shrinking its droplets and multiplying their number, the mechanism now called the Twomey effect.
link failing as of 17 Sept 2026