Customer Reviews

Atmospheric and Oceanic Fluid Dynamics: Fundamentals and Large-scale Circulation

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this book has the potential to become the Textbook for modern topics in GFD. you will still need Gill's, Pedlosky's GFD, and Holton's to give you a complete classical training. After that, there are no lack of more modern approaches such as this book, McWilliams', and Salmon's. combined with the great price, what more can one ask!?

Geoffrey Vallis has produced a book on Geophysical Fluid Dynamics (GFD) that ingeniously is both, a lucid introductory text and an encyclopedia.

Vallis does not arrogantly push you in hard at the deep end but caringly takes your hand and helps you enter the shallow end. Your confidence therefore grows quickly and you feel eager to explore and learn. This desire is fully satisfied because all the many details a truly curious mind wants to absorb are provided along the way. You are accompanied as close to the cutting edge of research as it is possible for a book. This makes it also attractive to those of you that are already comfortably in the deep end, especially because of its encyclopedic qualities. It allows you to extract conveniently the specific knowledge you need for your research.

If you are about to enter the world of GFD or you are already happily wandering in it, make sure Vallis' book is in your luggage.

I have been very impressed with the this excellent textbook. I started reading a pre-print of it at a point in time when I had not yet studied any fluid dynamics, oceanography, or atmospheric science. Despite this, I was able to follow the author's clear exposition as he introduced the fundamentals of GFD. Throughout the book, he does a good job combining descriptive explanations of the phenomena he discusses with physical intuition and mathematical derivations of the necessary equations. But Vallis does much more than just introduce readers to atmospheric and oceanic dynamics; he also conveys the fascination of the subject and gives the reader insights into further research required to improve our understanding of it.

Readers interested in exploring the subject further will find the references a valuable addition to the text. Note that this book only covers dynamics of the atmosphere and ocean. Readers can consult other books on atmospheric science and oceanography for broader introductions to these fields; however, the book is self-contained and doing so is not necessary in order to understand it. Graduate students seeking research topics might find some in the problems marked with diamonds.

I've read a lot of textbooks in many subjects and this one is truly exceptional.

This book is easy to follow if you have a base knowledge of fluid dynamics, the material seems to be well organized for a beginner. I certainly don't claim to be an expert on this material, but this book is very helpful.

I have read and perused this book, and absolutely do not like it. Some books teach and explain physics, others only provide a lot of recipes with some instructions on when to use them. This book mostly belongs to the latter category in my opinion.

The physical and mathematical reasoning is in many places confused and unclear. For example, on page 70 the reader is given an equation like a+b=0, is then told that it can be approximated by b=0, and then warned that this does NOT imply that a=0: how can we be so mathematically disrespectful to science students, after having tried to teach them subtler concepts like the difference between a scalar and a vector? The justification given in the book, that "the evolution of density is given by the thermodynamic equation in conjunction with an equation of state, and this should not be confused with the mass conservation equation" makes hardly physical sense given that the time-derivative of the density does appear in the mass-conservation equation.

I personally recommend the books of Pedlosky or Gill, but Vallis's can be used as a quick reference after the physics has been understood from the former.