The concept of vorticity is of central importance in fluid mechanics and the change and variability of atmospheric flow is dominated by transient vortices of different time- and space scales. Of particular importance are the most in- tense vortices such as hurricanes, typhoons and tornadoes which are associated with extreme and hazardous weather events of great concern to society. In recent years the un- derstanding of these phenomena has grown due to increased and improved surveillance by satellites and aircraft as well as by numerical modelling and simulation, theoretical studies and...

Forecasting the weather for the long and medium range is a difficult and scientifically challenging problem. Since the first operational weather prediction by numerical methods was carried out (on the BESK computer in Stockholm, Sweden, 1954) . there has been an ever accelerating development in computer technology. Hand in hand has followed a tremendous increase in the complexity of the atmospheric models used for weather prediction. The ability of these models to predict future states of the atmosphere has also increased rapidly, both due to model development and due to more accurate and...

Mik16s Cs6rgO and David M. Mason initiated their collaboration on the topics of this book while attending the CBMS-NSF Regional Confer- ence at Texas A & M University in 1981. Independently of them, Sandor Cs6rgO and Lajos Horv th have begun their work on this subject at Szeged University. The idea of writing a monograph together was born when the four of us met in the Conference on Limit Theorems in Probability and Statistics, Veszpr m 1982. This collaboration resulted in No. 2 of Technical Report Series of the Laboratory for Research in Statistics and Probability of Carleton University and...

The ocean has entranced mankind for as long as we have gazed upon it, traversed it, dived into it, and studied it. It remains ever changing and seemingly never changing. Each wave that progresses through the. imme- diate surf zone on every coast is strikingly different, yet the waves come again and again, as if never to end. The seasons come with essential reg- ularity, and- yet each is individual-whatever did happen to that year of the normal rainfall or tidal behavior? This fascination with the currents of the ocean has always had a most immediate practical aspect: shipping, transportation,...

It is now well known that the mid-ocean flow is almost everywhere domi nated by so-called synoptic or meso-scale eddies, rotating about nearly vertical axes and extending throughout the water column. A typical mid ocean horizontal scale is 100 km and a time scale is 100 days: these meso scale eddies have swirl speeds of order 10 cm s -1 which are usually con siderably greater than the long-term average flow. Many types of eddies with somewhat different scales and characteristics have been identified. The existence of such eddies was suspected by navigators more than a century ago and...

Numerical weather prediction on the one hand needs a very large number of floating point calculations, but on the other hand is very time-critical. Therefore, the largest computers available, i.e., the "supercomputers," have usually been acquired by the national meteorological services long before they were used in other fields of research or business. Since the available technology limits the speed of any single computer, parallel computations have become necessary to achieve further improvements in the number of results produced per time unit. This book collects the papers presented at two...

The Dawn of Massively Parallel Processing in Meteorology presents collected papers of the third workshop on this topic held at the European Centre of Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF). It provides an insight into the state of the art in using parallel processors operationally, and allows extrapolation to other time-critical applications. It also documents the advent of massively parallel systems to cope with these applications.