Applied Thermodynamics for Meteorologists, Sam Miller, Cambridge U. Press, 2015. $84.99 (392 pp.). ISBN 978-1-107-10071-8 Buy at Amazon
Thermodynamics, a subject essential to meteorology, can be a bit of a puzzle for undergraduates—and not a few of their instructors. Some key topics in the subject, such as entropy, challenge or upend intuition. Others, such as moist thermodynamics, are essential for understanding the circulation of the atmosphere and the chance of severe weather but are usually not addressed in introductory physics classes. As a result, meteorology students confront the mysteries of water and energy all at once in their undergraduate thermodynamics class while they gasp for air and grasp for practical ways to apply their knowledge.
Striking the right balance between theory and application is a challenge for instructors and for the authors of the textbooks they use. During the past two decades, several authors have attempted to find that balance. Craig Bohren and Bruce Albrecht, in their Atmospheric Thermodynamics (Oxford University Press, 1998), say they aspire to provide “rollicking good literature” for students, but the book’s digressions and wealth of detail make it the text that instructors should read before teaching the subject. Judith Curry and Peter Webster’s Thermodynamics of Atmospheres and Oceans (Academic Press, 1999) uses a broad multidisciplinary approach but deals only briefly with applications. Anastasios Tsonis’s An Introduction to Atmospheric Thermodynamics (Cambridge University Press, 2002) targets the one-semester undergraduate course in thermodynamics in departments of meteorology or atmospheric science, at the cost of meteorological applications. Grant Petty’s A First Course in Atmospheric Thermodynamics (Sundog Publishing, 2008) opts for less detail on the more obscure or philosophical aspects and more focus on observations and severe-weather indices. After some trial and error, our program at the University of Georgia has settled on Petty’s book.
Into this mix comes Sam Miller’s Applied Thermodynamics for Meteorologists. The author is an associate professor of meteorology and department chair at Plymouth State University, a department with a respected undergraduate-focused meteorology program. Miller’s background with the US Air Force and National Weather Service, coupled with his position in a teaching-intensive department, bodes well for a textbook that emphasizes the applied aspects of atmospheric thermodynamics. The result, however, is a mixed bag, with more good than not good, and with some of the blame for the latter resting on the publisher.
First, the positives. Miller’s book is conversational and down-to-earth. He pays more attention to derivations than do most other authors. As he leads the student through the material, he notes assumptions carefully, while successfully avoiding the annoying “it can be shown” tone of too many textbooks. Miller also provides data tables of key thermodynamic values for various substances, as I found to my delight while working on a research paper; the information is not easy to locate elsewhere. His treatment of entropy is clearer and more detailed than the discussion in Petty’s book. Numerous inclusions of real-life weather data, from surface weather maps to radiosonde soundings, relate the concepts to atmospheric observations. Petty’s text covers some of the same ground, but Petty’s illustrations are more often photographs of phenomena or instruments.
However, there are some glaring missteps that should not have made it through to the finished product. The most cringeworthy: The “Clausius” in “Clausius–Clapeyron equation” is misspelled as “Classius” every single time in the book, and that’s a lot of occurrences given the importance of that equation to moist thermodynamics! At the time of writing, that had not yet been corrected in the errata on the publisher’s website. Second, the copious weather data graphics in the book are confusing and difficult to read. They were obtained from the Plymouth State Weather Center’s website, which offers low-resolution gif files that reproduce poorly. End-of-chapter questions are too often perfunctory assignments of the “list this” or “name and describe” variety. It’s also surprising that Miller doesn’t reference many earlier texts on atmospheric thermodynamics, particularly Bohren and Albrecht’s book or Petty’s. The latter omission is especially odd because Petty’s book, with its applied approach to atmospheric thermodynamics, is by far the nearest kin to Miller’s.
Price is a final consideration in this era of spiraling educational costs. Miller’s text lists for $84.99, which is reasonable compared to the multi-hundred-dollar cost of many introductory-level science texts. However, Petty’s book, printed by his own Sundog Publishing, currently sells for $33.60. If Cambridge had provided a significantly more polished and vetted product with higher-quality graphics, then the additional $51 cost could be rationalized. But the differences between Miller’s and Petty’s books are relatively minor, and in at least some respects the cheaper book is also the better book. As a result, I will recommend that we continue to use Petty’s book in our program—but I also await a revised second edition of Miller’s text.
John Knox is an associate professor of geography in the atmospheric sciences program at the University of Georgia in Athens. He is a coauthor of Meteorology: Understanding the Atmosphere, 4th edition (Jones & Bartlett, 2015), and also serves as the chair of the Board on Higher Education for the American Meteorological Society.
