BOOK REVIEWS 99

their economy, and for whom the prospect of oversupply is a daunting proposition. Even after implementing these recommendations, there is still a long way to go before international policy-makers can say that our improved use of climate information is benefiting mankind as a whole.

This report meets its stated objectives well. It will be of most interest to providers and users of climate information within the agribusiness sector, in the United States and throughout the world, and to those involved in planning our future approach to climate research and its applications to society.

J. I. JOHN Oceanroutes ( U K )

WORLD SURVEY OF CLIMATOLOGY, GENERAL CLIMATOLOGY 1 A, HEAT BALANCE CLIMATOLOGY, A. Kessler, Elsevier (Amsterdam), 1986, No. of pages: 224 + xii. Price; $51.75.

Although it is numbered as volume lA, Heat Balance Climatology is the fifteenth volume of The World Survey of Climatology to be published; its format will, therefore, be familiar to many readers of this journal. After a brief sketch of the historical background and a very short introduction to the Earth‘s radiation budget, the remaining four chapters each describe the climatology of a single component of the surface energy budget: net radiation, latent heat flux, sensible heat flux and the storage term. Each of these chapters follows a similar pattern, beginning with descriptions of the global distributions of the mean annual and monthly fluxes and going on to diurnal and annual variation at individual stations. The chapter on net radiation is the longest, no doubt reflecting the state of the relevant observing networks. The separate radiative components are not considered. This, the foreword explains, is because a separate volume devoted to short-wave radiation was planned.

The many tables and clear diagrams contain a great deal of data. Sadly, not enough attention is paid in the text to explain the original investigators’ methods, and this makes it difficult for the reader to assess the significance of differences between several estimates of the same quantity. I found the author’s style of expression rather opaque at times and the use of c.g.s. units annoying. The foreword claims that this is to maintain consistency with the other volumes in the series. It does, I find it annoying there as well.

The text was first made ready for publication in the early 1970s and it would seem that it has undergone only minor revision since then. It is noticeable that the great majority of the references are to work published before 1974. This is a pity, making the book dated as soon as it appears.

D. WARREN British Antarctic Survey

CLOUD INVESTIGATION BY SATELLITE, R. S . Scorer, Ellis Horwood (Chichester), 1986. No. of pages: 320. Price; E39.50.

Having been an enthusiastic admirer and almost full-time user of weather satellite imagery for over 20 years I approached this book with meteorological mouth-watering anticipation. Sad to say, I soon discovered that the hors d’oeuvres of the introductory chapters leave an odd taste in the mouth, the infra-red images it deploys in thick profusion (more than 600 in all, one is told) are awkwardly garnished, and the meal as a whole is quite disappointing to the critical palate.

Less of a textbook than a gallery of pictures with explanatory notes, Cloud Investigation by Satellite opens with some short introductory chapters before dealing in turn with a wide range of synoptic and sub-synoptic scale cloud features drawn from the North Atlantic, Europe, the Mediterranean, the North Atlantic and, somewhat incongruously, the western Pacific. Brief, paragraph-length, explanations are given of selected image contents, sometimes selected meteorologically (e.g. ‘Convection Sheets and Cells’ and ‘Lee Waves and Fohn Cirrus’) and sometimes geographically (e.g. ‘The Western Pacific’ and ‘The Lee of Norway’). In neither case does a logical