Weather A Concise Introduction

Where should we start with our study of the atmosphere? How should we first approach the weather? Like many scientists, meteorologists first make observations. Then they raise questions, and try to answer them. In this first chapter, we will quickly describe four of the elements, also called variables, of weather that meteorologists regularly observe, measure, and chart on weather maps, before we return to each of them for a more thorough exploration in subsequent chapters. Three of these elements are fairly intuitive: when concerned with the weather, we like to know how warm or cold it will be (temperature), whether it will be windy or not (wind), and whether it will rain or not (precipitation). The fourth variable, atmospheric pressure, is less intuitive, but it may be the most important to a meteorologist, as we will soon discover.