Overview and Definition of Mesoscale Meteorology

Abstract

For a substantial fraction of the modern history of meteorology, practitioners of the science have been fond of classifying the highly various and complex phenomena of atmospheric flow according to the physical scales of apparently coherent structures that appear generally or intermittently within the flow. The conscientiousness and vigor applied to scale classification have advanced to the point where the layman, listening to a contemporary discussion of atmospheric motions and ``scale interaction,'' might conclude that the atmosphere is somehow quantized and the scales are discrete. In reality, of course, the spectrum of atmospheric motions is smooth and continuous between the limits imposed by the mean free path of molecules on the short end and the circumference of the Earth on the large.