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This book is useful not only for young but also for mature scientists who are preparing methods for studying natural environmental phenomena and their alteration by human activity.
As spatio-temporal scales of natural environmental phenomena become larger, the variance of their fluctuations increases or decreases over wide ranges. Such signals appear not only in environmental dynamics but everywhere, even in seemingly unrelated fields. When one looks at these signals more closely, one finds that they are governed by specific, measurable scaling laws, that is, a statistical relationship between big and small, between fast and slow.
In this book, the authors describe and explain processes that have puzzled environmental science for decades, such as the climate crisis, clouds, turbulence, earthquakes, cosmic rays, sea wind waves, hurricanes, floods, radiation field in the climate system, ozone hole, greenhouse effect, air pollution, El Nino / La Nina, nowcasting models.
List of contents
1. Necessary notions from the theory of stochastic processe.- 2. Turbulence.- 3. Earthquakes.- 4. Energy spectrum of cosmic rays.- 5. Turbulence and rotation.- 6. Sea wind waves.- 7. Turbulence eddy mixing in the atmosphere and on the sea surface .- 8. Statistical structure of the sky bodies surface relief - Kaula's rule.- 9. Stochastic motions at the prescribed rotation (hurricanes and other vortices).- 10. Size distributions for lakes and rivers. Flood damag.- 11. Additions and comments to previous sections.- 12. Similarity and dimension, rules of action.- 13. Convection.- 14. Clouds and turbulence, self-similarity, and peculiar invariants.- 15. The global sea level dynamics.- 16. The intrinsic properties of precipitation and rainfall.- 17. The global vertical atmospheric ozone long-memory.- 18. The air temperature scaling effect.- 19. The spectral solar radiation variability.- 20. Scaling of near-ground spectral albedo variability.- 21. Scaling properties of air pollution.- 22. Scaling effect in Greenhouse Gasses.- 23. A New Tool to Study Complex Systems: The Natural Time.- 24. El Niño Southern Oscillation; A New Prediction Tool.- 25. Other Applications of Natural Time to Extreme Phenomena.- 26. The climate linear and non-linear regime.- References.
