1424 BOOK REVIEWS

PREDICTION OF SOLAR RADIATION IN AREAS WITH A SPECIFIC MICROCLIMATE, R. Dogniaux (ed.), Kluwer Academic Publishers (Dordrecht), 1994. No. of pages: xii + 107. Price: Dfl 95.00, US$ 58s.00, UKf 38..00 (hardback). IBSN 0-7923-2596-6.

For many years, the Commission of the European Communities has supported climatological studies of solar radiation for the ultimate benefit of architects and engineers. The work described in this report was intended to complement a European Solar Radiation Atlas by deal- ing with solar ‘microclimates’. Traditionally, the term‘mi- croclimate’ refers to horizontal scales up to 100 m, but this report is concerned with scales up to 100 km, often referred to as ‘mesoclimate’. Differences of insolation on this larger scale are usually a consequence of differences in cloudiness associated with topography or of pollution generated by industrial sources. The report is concerned mainly with ways of quantifying the attenuation of total (global) radiation by pollution using the Linke turbidity index. Several methods for estimating this index are presented, all highly empirical. The distribution of sky radiances is also discussed.

The reviewer was particularly interested in the compar- ison of radiation at two Scottish stations, one at the Bush Estate south of Edinburgh where he works and the other close to Edinburgh Airport. Despite his familiarity with both environments, he was unable to interpret or indeed to imagine any useful application of the analysis presented in Table 1 1, which shows how the CV of daily radiation totals is correlated with wet and dry-bulb temperature, relative humidity, vapour pressure, barometric pressure, wind speed, rainfall, insolation, sunshine hours, cloud amount and height, and visibility.

Although this report represents the h i t s of much effort by the Editor and by many contributors acknowledged in the Preface, it is doubtful whether it will be widely used. Experts in the field may find useful information in tables (e.g. atmospheric transparency indices for sites throughout Europe) but those wishing to learn how radiation ‘microclimate’ can be estimated at a site with no solarimeter will fmd much of the text difficult to follow. Installing a solarimeter and data logger will usually prove a better long-term solution than struggling with sets of equations full of empirical constants.

CLIMATE HISTORY AND THE MODERN WORLD, 2nd edn, Hubert H. Lamb, Routledge (London), 1995. No. of pages: xxiv + 433. Price: E60.00, ISBN 0-415-12734-3 (hardback); f15.99, ISBN 0-415-12735-1 (paperback).

In recent years there has been a large boom in studies on climatic change, mostly in the form of rather short articles in reviewed journals. As a consequence, it has become increasingly difficult to obtain a general view of the field, in particular for students from neighbouring disciplines. It is in this situation that the second edition of Lamb’s well-known book is highly welcomed, because it still provides a global view and embraces the whole time span from the last ice age to the present. The Emeritus Professor of the School of Environmental Sciences at The University of East Anglia is among the few who, a long time ago recognized the potential of documentary data for the reconstruction of climate over the last 1000 years. Lamb was the first who put this information on charts as a basis for reconstructing seasonal surface pressure patterns. Although some of his reconstructions are problematic, considering the inade- quacies of the original data, they should be welcomed as an important step towards representing climatic change in a way that is suited to our understanding of atmospheric processes in the age of satellite images. Dealing with the economic and demographic conse- quences of past climatic variations is undoubtedly the most formidable task that Lamb has attempted. Not only are the reconstructions of climate in the pre-instrumental period not detailed enough, in most cases, appropriate demographic or economic studies are not available, because historians were not interested in assessing impacts of climate until quite recently. Thus Lamb has referred mainly to studies in marginal climates, such as in iceland or in Greenland, where the consequences of small shifts in temperature could be drastic. The original text has not changed except in the last chapters because integrating the results of the last 15 years would have been equivalent to rewriting the entire book. It is an open question as to whether another scholar will follow in Lamb’s footsteps, and so this book will keep its value as a synthesis for a long time.

J. L. MONTEITH Institute of Terrestrial Ecology, (UK)

CHRISTIAN PFISTER University of Bern