This book describes the history of the progress made in auroral science and magnetospheric physics by providing examples of ideas, controversies, struggles, acceptance, and success in some instances. The author, a distinguished auroral scientist, fully describes his experiences in characterizing and explaining auroral phenomena. The volume also includes beautiful full-color photos of the aurora.
An overview of the aurora borealis that covers the science behind it, historical reactions to it and research of it, and aspects of the phenomenon yet to be understood, and provides illustrations--including color photos and nineteenth-century engravings--and a list of further resources.
Published by the American Geophysical Union as part of the Geophysical Monograph Series, Volume 197. Many of the most basic aspects of the aurora remain unexplained. While in the past terrestrial and planetary auroras have been largely treated in separate books, Auroral Phenomenology and Magnetospheric Processes: Earth and Other Planets takes a holistic approach, treating the aurora as a fundamental process and discussing the phenomenology, physics, and relationship with the respective planetary magnetospheres in one volume. While there are some behaviors common in auroras of the different planets, there are also striking differences that test our basic understanding of auroral processes. The objective, upon which this monograph is focused, is to connect our knowledge of auroral morphology to the physical processes in the magnetosphere that power and structure discrete and diffuse auroras. Understanding this connection will result in a more complete explanation of the aurora and also further the goal of being able to interpret the global auroral distributions as a dynamic map of the magnetosphere. The volume synthesizes five major areas: auroral phenomenology, aurora and ionospheric electrodynamics, discrete auroral acceleration, aurora and magnetospheric dynamics, and comparative planetary aurora. Covering the recent advances in observations, simulation, and theory, this book will serve a broad community of scientists, including graduate students, studying auroras at Mars, Earth, Saturn, and Jupiter. Projected beyond our solar system, it may also be of interest for astronomers who are looking for aurora-active exoplanets.
This three-volume A-to-Z compendium consists of over 300 entries written by a team of leading international scholars and researchers working in the field. Authoritative and up-to-date, the encyclopedia covers the processes that produce our weather, important scientific concepts, the history of ideas underlying the atmospheric sciences, biographical accounts of those who have made significant contributions to climatology and meteorology and particular weather events, from extreme tropical cyclones and tornadoes to local winds.
For many years I was organizing a weekly seminar on dynamical astronomy, and I used to make some historical remarks on every subject, including some anecdotes from my contacts with many leading scientists over the years. I described also the development of various subjects and the emergence of new ideasindynamicalastronomy. Thenseveralpeoplepromptedmetowritedown these remarks, which cannot be found in papers, or books. Thus, I decided to write this book, which contains my experiences over the years. I hope that this book may be helpful to astronomy students all over the world. During my many years of teaching, as a visiting professor, in American Universities (1962-1994, Yale, Harvard, MIT, Cornell, Chicago, Maryland and Florida) I was impressed by the quality of my graduate students. Most of them were very bright, asking penetrating questions, and preparing their homework in a perfect way. In a few cases, instead of a ?nal examination, I assigned to them some small research projects and they presented their results at the end of the course. They were excellent in preparing the appropriate slides and in presenting their results in a concise and clear way.
His Dark Materials is one of the most popular, award-winning fantasies of all time, a bestselling trilogy hailed as "a modern classic" by The New York Times. Now, for the first time ever, Lois H. Gresh helps young readers examine Pullman's intricate universe with Exploring His Dark Materials, the ultimate companion guide. Gresh's fun, interactive book explores the complex science, religion, and fantastic elements of His Dark Materials in a way that's both informative and fun for younger readers. Exploring His Dark Materials is filled with sidebars, history, facts and an in-depth analysis of the books, answering questions like: *What are daemons? *Why is dust important to the series? * Is Dark Material real and how does it relate to our universe? * What are the origins of ghosts and shapeshifters? *And much more! Exploring His Dark Materials is a thrilling and essential guide for young adults to help them explore this fantastic and challenging fantasy world.
Here is a fascinating text that integrates topics pertaining to all scales of the MHD-waves, emphasizing the linkages between the ULF-waves below the ionosphere on the ground and magnetospheric MHD-waves. It will be most helpful to graduate and post-graduate students, familiar with advanced calculus, who study the science of MHD-waves in the magnetosphere and ionosphere. The book deals with Ultra-Low-Frequency (ULF)-electromagnetic waves observed on the Earth and in Space.
The Dynamical Ionosphere: A Systems Approach to Ionospheric Irregularity examines the Earth's ionosphere as a dynamical system with signatures of complexity. The system is robust in its overall configuration, with smooth space-time patterns of daily, seasonal and Solar Cycle variability, but shows a hierarchy of interactions among its sub-systems, yielding apparent unpredictability, space-time irregularity, and turbulence. This interplay leads to the need for constructing realistic models of the average ionosphere, incorporating the increasing knowledge and predictability of high variability components, and for addressing the difficulty of dealing with the worst cases of ionospheric disturbances, all of which are addressed in this interdisciplinary book. Borrowing tools and techniques from classical and stochastic dynamics, information theory, signal processing, fluid dynamics and turbulence science, The Dynamical Ionosphere presents the state-of-the-art in dealing with irregularity, forecasting ionospheric threats, and theoretical interpretation of various ionospheric configurations. - Presents studies addressing Earth's ionosphere as a complex dynamical system, including irregularities and radio scintillation, ionospheric turbulence, nonlinear time series analysis, space-ionosphere connection, and space-time structures - Utilizes interdisciplinary tools and techniques, such as those associated with stochastic dynamics, information theory, signal processing, fluid dynamics and turbulence science - Offers new data-driven models for different ionospheric variability phenomena - Provides a synoptic view of the state-of-the-art and most updated theoretical interpretation, results and data analysis tools of the "worst case" behavior in ionospheric configurations
This is an unusual book, combining as it does papers on astrobiology, history of astronomy and sundials, but—after all—Woody Sullivan is an unusual man. In late 2003 I spent two fruitful and enjoyable months in the Astronomy Department at the University of Washington (UW) working on archival material accumulated over the decades by Woody, for a book we will co-author with Jessica Chapman on the early development of Australian astronomy. The only serious intellectual distraction I faced during this period was planning for an IAU colloquium on transits of Venus scheduled for June 2004 in England, where I was down to present the ‘Cook’ paper. I knew Woody was also interested in transits (and, indeed, anything remotely connected with shadows—see his paper on page 3), and in discussing the Preston meeting with him it transpired that his 60th birthday was timed to occur just one week later. This was where the seed of ‘Woodfest’ began to germinate. Why not invite friends and colleagues to join Woody in Seattle and celebrate this proud event? I put the idea to Woody and others at UW, they liked it, and ‘Woodfest’ was born.