(This is another old post that was manually revived from a backup)

Previously, I posted this reading list from a professor on my PhD committee. At one point the atmospheric science department at CSU offered an experimental course just for reviewing seminal papers taught by Dr. Thomas Birner. I wish I could have taken a class like this when I was at CSU. The reading list for the class is pretty thorough and organized, so I thought I’d post it for other people to find. I made an attempt to collect PDF files of the original articles, but I couldn’t find all of them. Luckily I found most of them on a great page maintained by Dr. Geoff Vallis.

General Circulation

Halley, 1686: An historical account of the trade winds, and monsoons, observable in the seas between and near the tropicks, with an attempt to assign the phisical cause of the said winds

Hadley, 1735: Concerning the cause of the general trade winds

Ferrel, 1856: An essay on the winds and the currents of the ocean

Jeffreys, 1919: On travelling atmospheric disturbances

Defant, 1921: The circulation of the atmosphere in the mid-latitudes of Earth

Jeffreys, 1926: On the dynamics of geostrophic winds

Walker, 1928: World weather

Brewer, 1949: Evidence for a world circulation provided by the measurementshelium and water vapor distribution in the stratosphere

Munk, 1950: On the wind-driven ocean circulation

Munk and Palmen, 1951: Note on the dynamics of the antarctic circumpolar current

Eliassen, 1952: Slow thermally or frictionally controlled meridional circulation in a circular vortex

Lorenz, 1955: Available potential energy and the maintenance of the general circulation

Phillips, 1956: The general circulation of the atmosphere: A numerical experiment

Bjerknes, 1966: A possible response of the atmospheric Hadley circulation to equatorial anomalies of ocean temperature.

Gill et al., 1974: Energy partition in the large-scale ocean circulation and the production of mid ocean eddies

Basic Dynamics

Laplace, 1775: Dynamic theory of tides

Kelvin, 1869: On vortex motion

Kelvin, 1879: On gravitational oscillations of rotating water

Ekman, 1905: On the influence of the Earth’s rotation on ocean-currents

Rossby, 1938: On the mutual adjustment of pressure and velocity distributions certain simple current systems, II

Rossby, 1939: Relation between variations in the intensity of the zonal circulation of the atmosphere and the displacements of the semi-permanent centers of action

Haurwitz, 1940: The motion of atmospheric disturbances on the spherical earth

Ertel, 1942: A new hydrodynamic vorticity theorem

Charney, 1947: The dynamics of long-waves in a baroclinic westerly current

Charney, 1948: On the scale of atmospheric motions

Eady, 1949: Long waves and cyclone waves

Hovmöller, 1949: The trough-and-ridge diagram

Greenspan & Howard, 1963: On a time-dependent motion of a rotating fluid

Hoskins et al., 1985: On the use and interpretation of isentropic potential vorticity maps

Weather Forecasting

Bjerknes, 1904: The problem of weather forecasting, considered from the point of view of mechanics and physics

Bjerknes, 1914: Meteorology as an exact science

Lorenz, 1963: Deterministic nonperiodic flow

Climate Change

Fourier, 1824: On the Temperatures of the Terrestrial Sphere and Interplanetary Space

Tyndall, 1861: On the Absorption and radiation of Heat by Gases and Vapours, and on the Physical Connexion of Radiation, Absorption, and Conduction

Arrhenius, 1896: On the influence of carbonic acid in the air upon the temperature of the ground

Callendar, 1938: The Artificial Production of Carbon Dioxide and its Influence on Temperature

Manabe & Wetherald, 1967: Thermal equilibrium of the atmosphere with a given distribution of relative humidity

Stratosphere & Ozone

Teisserenc de Bort, 1902: The variations of the temperature of the free air at great altitudes

Assmann, 1902: On the existence of a warmer air flow at heights of 10 to 15 km

Chapman, 1929: A theory of upper-atmospheric ozone

Scherhag, 1952: The explosive stratospheric warmings of the late winter 1951/1952

Reed et al., 1961: Evidence of a downward propagating annual wind reversal in the equatorial stratosphere

[and Ebdon & Veryard, 1961]

Danielsen, 1968: Stratospheric-tropospheric exchange based on radioactivity, ozone, and potential vorticity

Molina & Roland, 1974: Stratospheric sink for chlorofluoromethances; chlorine atom catalysed destcruction of ozone