Steps in the Evolution of Climatology: From Descriptive to Analytic

Important developments in our understanding of the earth’s climate can be traced in pathlike fashion stretching back over the centuries. Indeed, there are many such paths, each representing a particular area of climatology. This chapter identifies some of the important contributions along two particular paths. The first path traces developments in ideas about the earth’s energy budget and about the balance between incoming solar radiation and outgoing terrestrial radiation. Ideas about the earth’s energy budget provided the first and most direct explanation of the earth’s thermal climate and led to the development of energy budget climate models. The second path traces developments in ideas about the dynamics of climate, including the general circulation of the earth’s atmosphere and ocean and the associated hydrologic cycle. These ideas led to the construction of dynamical climate models. Both the energy budget climate models and the dynamical climate models are now being used to address questions about the earth’s climate—past, present, and future.