This book is a superficial bibliography of existing equations in theoretical planetary fluid dynamics. Perhaps that is what the authors mean by an introduction. As such, the book is useful for understanding some of the concepts that contribute to planetary climate.
There are some problems. The first problem is that climate is not three dimensional. (It is bizarre to discuss climate without the preeminence of the temporal dimension.) Of course the authors are aware of the importance of time. However, there are bizarre omissions in the presentation of the theoretical work with relation to the underlying physical reasons for climate change. Superficial dynamics equations give you no insight into the actual history of Earth's climate any more than they yield the actual state of an ocean wave breaking upon a shore at any specific moment in time. All you get is a general abstraction.
There are good reasons for this omission. The physical understanding of the history of Earth's climate is still locked in controversy due to the scarcity of good verifiable data. That means the physical understanding of Earth's climate is still evolving.
Secondly, the book fails as an introduction into climate modeling. The transition from theoretical continuous simplifications to actual discrete model is simply not adequately covered. The background theory on discretization of continuous differential equations does not bridge the gap necessary to understand climate models.
Again there are good reasons for this omission. I believe neither author has actually written a climate model. Thus they do not discuss the fundamentals of climate models. Instead they discuss differential equations. The distinction is a knowledge of what can be modeled and what can not with existing technologies. Thus, they omit the all important defining assumptions behind the model plots presented in the final section of the book.
A well known maxim applies to this work. There is a very small number of people who actually write climate models. There is a bigger client community that just runs their model and talks about what it produced. This book has ample examples of the client products. What is obvious is that the authors, as most clients, do not know what defines those products. They do not know what is actually used and what is not. They do not know what limits the usefulness of those products. And they omit the discussion of important facets of those models that is only known to the climate model authors. That may sound like a negative comment but it is true of most scientific publication in this area. As such it is a state of the art.
In summary, if you want to know what goes into a model then ask somebody who built one. Don't ask the manager or PI that is five levels above him. They will tell you a lot about everything except what you want to know.
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