Guido Visconti – författare

This book is a collection of the lectures, held at the International Summer School ISSAOS-2000 in L''Aquila (Italy), given by invited lecturers coming from both Europe and the USA. The goal of the book is to provide a broad panorama of spaceborne remote sensing techniques, at both microwave and visible-infrared bands and by both active and passive sensors, for the retrieval of atmospheric and oceanic parameters. A significant emphasis is given to the physical modeling background, instrument potential and limitations, inversion methods and applications. Topics on international remote sensing programs and assimilation techniques into numerical weather forecast models are also touched.

The main purpose of the book is to offer to young scientists, Ph.D. or equivalent students, and to all who would like to have a broad-spectrum understanding of spaceborne remote sensing capabilities, introductory material to each remote sensing topic written by the most qualified experts in the field.

This book presents the result of an innovative challenge, to create a systematic literature overview driven by machine-generated content. Questions and related keywords were prepared for the machine to query, discover, collate and structure by Artificial Intelligence (AI) clustering. The AI-based approach seemed especially suitable to provide an innovative perspective as the topics are indeed both complex, interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary, for example, climate, planetary and evolution sciences. Springer Nature has published much on these topics in its journals over the years, so the challenge was for the machine to identify the most relevant content and present it in a structured way that the reader would find useful. The automatically generated literature summaries in this book are intended as a springboard to further discoverability. They are particularly useful to readers with limited time, looking to learn more about the subject quickly and especially if they are new to the topics. Springer Nature seeks to support anyone who needs a fast and effective start in their content discovery journey, from the undergraduate student exploring interdisciplinary content, to Master- or PhD-thesis developing research questions, to the practitioner seeking support materials, this book can serve as an inspiration, to name a few examples. 

This book is an introductory course to the physics and chemistry of the atmosphere and to climate dynamics. It covers the basics in thermodynamics, fluid dynamics, radiation, and chemistry and explains the most intriguing problems that currently exist in the study of the atmospheres of the Earth and planets. A particular effort is made to approach the different topics intuitively. Among the themes covered are the most recent evolution concerning the chemistry of polluted troposphere, the global warming problem, and chaos and nonlinear theory.

The book is almost completely rewritten in comparison to the previous edition, with a more logical organization of the chapters. The fundamentals of thermodynamics, radiation, fluid dynamics and chemistry are introduced in the first six chapters, including a new chapter on remote sensing. Also there is an additional chapter on geoengineering. A significant addition to the new edition, at the end of each chapter, are examples where the topics introduced in the chapter are further discussed with application to classical problems or new research items. Many of these examples are accompanied by computer programs. The most important updates deal with the theory of the general circulation, the methods to evaluate GCM, the detailed discussion of the urban troposphere and the chaos and nonlinear phenomena.

This book is a critical appraisal of the status of the so-called Climate Sciences (CS). These are contributed by many other basic sciences like physics, geology, chemistry and as such employ theoretical and experimental methods. In the last few decades most of the CS have been identified with the global warming problem and numerical models have been used as the main tool for their investigations. The produced predictions can only be partially tested against experimental data and may represent one of the reasons CS are drifting away from the route of the scientific method. On the other hand the study of climate faces many other interesting and mostly unsolved problems (think about ice ages) whose solution could clarify how the climatic system works. As for the global warming, while its existence is largely proved, scientifically it can be solved only with a large experimental effort carried out for a few decades. Problems can arise when not proved hypotheses are adopted as the basisfor public policy without the recognition that they may be on shaky ground. The strong interactions of the Global Warming (GW) with the society create another huge problem of political nature for the CS.

The book argues that the knowledge gained so far on the specific GW problem is enough for the relevant political decisions to be taken and that Climate Science should resume the study of the climate system with appropriate means and methods. The book introduces the most relevant concepts needed for the discussion in the text or in appropriate appendices and it is directed to the general public with upper undergraduate background. Each chapter closes with a debate between a climate scientist and a humanist to reflect the discussions between climate science and philosophy or climate scientists and society.