Weather Cycles

After seven years at the UK National Physical Laboratory researching atmospheric physics, Bill Burroughs spent three years as a UK Scientific Attaché in Washington D.C. Between 1974 and 1995, he held a series of senior posts in the UK Departments of Energy and then Health. He is now a professional science writer and has published several books on various aspects of weather and climate (two as a co-author), and also three books for children on lasers. These books include Watching the World's Weather (1991), Weather Cycles (1992), Does the Weather Really Matter? (1997), The Climate Revealed (1999), and Climate Change: A Multidisciplinary Approach (2001), all with Cambridge University Press. In addition, he acted as lead author for the World Meteorological Organisation on a book entitled Climate: Into the Twenty-First Century. He has also written widely on the weather and climate in newspapers and popular magazines.

Preface; Acknowledgements; 1. The search for cycles; 2. Statistical background; 3. Instrumental records; 4. Proxy data; 5. The global climate; 6. Extraterrestrial influences; 7. Autovariance and other explanations; 8. Nothing more than chaos?; Appendix A.1. Measures of variability; A.2. Sherman's statistic; A.3. Fourier series and Fourier analysis; A.4. Calculations of the coefficients of harmonic analysis; A.5. Maximum entropy spectral analysis (MESA); A.6. Smoothing and filtering; A.7. Wavelet analysis; A.8. Singular spectrum analysis; A.9. Noise; A.10. Detrending of prewhitening; Annotated bibliography; References; Glossary; Index.