book reviews

1990 Bulletin of The American Meteorological Society - (BAMS)  
The volume arises from an international symposium on "Flow and Transport in the Natural Environment," held in Canberra, Australia, in September 1987. Unlike many books generated from specialized conferences or workshops, this book contains 13 in-depth review papers in five areas: subsurface flow, canopy and air-surface interface processes, flow over obstacles, convection in the lower atmosphere, and processes of wind and water erosion. Commentaries, drawing upon other papers and posters in the
more » ... onference, as well as the rapporteur's insight, add substantially to each review paper. Twenty-four authors contribute papers and commentaries. The net result is a compact, up-to-date review of specific aspects of the transport processes of the nearsurface earth atmosphere. The treatment of each subject is founded upon basic theoretical principles drawing upon observational input and dealing with practical applications where appropriate. Rearrangement of the sequence of papers according to the above groupings may have provided a somewhat more logical sequence, particularly in the case of flow over complex terrain and wake flow. Subsurface flow is treated in three papers dealing with saturated and unsaturated subsurface flow and with the physical properties of soils. In each of these three areas the authors of the review papers, and the rapporteurs, grapple with the inherent problem of nonlinearity, temporal and spatial variability, nonsteady, multidimensional velocity fields, and a wide range of time and space scales. While each strives to establish a sound theoretical foundation, suspicion remains that the present theoretical frameworks are inadequate and may never, in some cases, be adequate. The current state of the art in ground-water transport would seem to be similar to that currently prevailing in atmospheric turbulence and boundarylayer formulation. A stochastic approach is used under steady state saturated conditions to determine solute velocities and concentrations. Both the review paper and the commentary take the reader through the development of convective-dispersion models which assume
doi:10.1175/1520-0477-71.6.845 fatcat:wqoeueaynnblxecczluy6grrpu