The Stochastic Nature of Environmental Phenomena and Processes

This book is useful not only for young but also for mature scientists who are preparing methods for studying natural environmental phenomena and their alteration by human activity. As spatio-temporal scales of natural environmental phenomena become larger, the variance of their fluctuations increases or decreases over wide ranges. Such signals appear not only in environmental dynamics but everywhere, even in seemingly unrelated fields. When one looks at these signals more closely, one finds that they are governed by specific, measurable scaling laws, that is, a statistical relationship between big and small, between fast and slow. In this book, the authors describe and explain processes that have puzzled environmental science for decades, such as the climate crisis, clouds, turbulence, earthquakes, cosmic rays, sea wind waves, hurricanes, floods, radiation field in the climate system, ozone hole, greenhouse effect, air pollution, El Nino / La Nina, nowcasting models.