Abstract
The two major regional climatology textbooks at the dawn of the quantitative revolution took very different approaches to regionalization. Kendrew’s The Climates of the Continents follows a grand tour of the continents approach, whereas Rumney’s Climatology and the World’s Climates uses major plant associations to define regions. Each approach has advantages and their impact is still visible today, although neither remains current. Today, physical geography and general climatology textbooks have reverted to a modified Köppen Classification System for organizing their regional climatology chapters. Regional climatology as a subject has been mostly displaced by synoptic or dynamic analysis.
I Introduction
Any regional climatology text is problematic from a methodology standpoint. If the regions are to be defined by strict combinations of climatic variables, the analyst faces the task of organizing large amounts of data collected at individual points into spatially coherent areas. Such a task may be possible within a small spatial area, but would prove to be unwieldly at the spatial scale required to produce coherent regions suitable for a text. The task is further complicated by the non-uniform distribution of data collection sites over the landscape.
Historical attempts at climate classification have resulted in systems designed to address some particular aspect of the response to primary climatic controls, such as evapotranspiration, or to map surrogates for the response to climate such as plant associations (Gregory, 1985).
Using plant associations as surrogates for general climatic conditions is the approach chosen by George Rumney (1968). Rumney argues that the study of Earth’s climates is essentially geographic, and that the climate of a region manifests itself in visible landscape properties which may be used for regionalization. Thus he based his regionalization on 17 distinct plant associations first appearing in the US Department of Agriculture 1941 Yearbook (Blumenstock and Thornthwaite, 1941).
Kendrew (1961) takes a different approach in his text, which first appeared in 1922 with four subsequent editions (1927, 1937, 1953 and 1961). Instead of developing climatically homogenous regions, Kendrew applies a systematic methodology, using the scientific principles of climatology to explore and elucidate the climate types found throughout the continents of the world.
Each text contains tables of monthly rainfall and temperature for individual stations, along with figures mapping important climatic variables such as the length of the growing season or mean annual temperature range.
Each text will be addressed in turn followed by a comparison and judgement of their long-term impact on regional climatology.
II The texts
George Richard Rumney (1914–2009) was born in Buffalo, NY, and raised in Windsor, Ontario. He graduated from University of Michigan in 1940 with a degree in geography. Service in the Royal Canadian Air Force, US Navy and the Office of Strategic Services occupied him during World War II. Following the war, he returned to Ann Arbor, graduating with a PhD in geography in 1947. He accepted a teaching position at Florida State University but moved to the University of Connecticut in 1948. At UCONN he reestablished the Geography Department and helped found the Marine Sciences Institute at UCONN’s campus in Groton. He attributed his time in Naval service for kindling his lifetime fascination with the atmosphere and oceans (American Association of Geographers, 2009; Hartford Courant, 2009).
Climatology and the World’s Climates was published in 1968. To organize the world into describable regions, Rumney decided to use plant associations, reasoning that ‘…the presence and form of natural vegetation are mainly attributable to the qualities of the atmosphere’ (1968: 106). Table 1 lists his climate classification, which comprises 17 classes covering major phytoclimatic groups from ‘Mid-Latitude Coastal Evergreen Forest’ to ‘Tropical Thorn Scrub Woodlands’. The book begins with seven chapters (110 pages) covering basic concepts of the atmosphere as you expect to see in any physical geography text. The last chapter in this group covers climate classification and contains valuable historical resource material on some of the more common classification systems. Interestingly, Rumney inserts an entire chapter (Chapter 20, 23 pages) on the dynamics of tropical weather and climate in the middle of his regional chapters.
World climates as classified by Rumney.
The majority of the book, 16 chapters covering some 500 pages, devotes chapters to a regional climatology of the major plant associations. The book places greater emphasis on the Northern Hemisphere (Figures 1 and 2) as often two major associations are combined into one Southern Hemisphere chapter and individual chapters are devoted to the same plant association in different parts of the same hemisphere.
Micrometeorological Tower northeast of Snowden, Saskatchewan. This region is classified by Rumney as Boreal Forest. Photo by the author.
The Very Large Array Observatory in Socorro, NM. Rumney classifies this region as Subtropical Interior Desert. Photo by the author.
The book also slants toward forest associations as shown in Table 2 which lists the percentage of surface covered by each plant association and the corresponding number of chapters devoted to them.
Percent coverage of the main groups of plant life according to Rumney.
Overall the book does succeed in the goal of providing a regional climatology based on plant associations, but this is more than a phytogeography text. The book provides tables of climatological statistics for many stations within each region and most importantly places the region within the context of the knowledge of the general circulation and air mass climatology of the time. This is Rumney’s response to Schaefer’s (1953) warning against sterility in regional geography if it is not followed by the application of systematic principles to the region.
Wilfred George Kendrew (1884–1962) was born in Keith, Banffshire, and raised in Dublin. He attended Oxford University, attaining a pass degree as a non-collegiate student with an interest in classics. Employed at Oxford as a junior tutor, he was awarded a Certificate in Regional Geography and a Diploma in Geography, both in 1911. He remained affiliated with Oxford in a variety of roles, including Director of the Radcliffe Meteorological Station, until his retirement in 1950. He served with the Royal Irish Fusiliers in World War I and as a Lieutenant in the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve during World War II. A comprehensive profile of Kendrew has been provided by Kenworthy (2007).
Kendrew recognized the need for a comprehensive review of regional climatology written in English. Climates of the Continents was published in 1922 to address that need, but rather than adopt a purely descriptive regional approach prevalent to geography at that time, Kendrew applied a systematic methodology to explain how the climates of the continents were the result of the physical principles of atmospheric circulation and air mass analysis. The book was recognized and celebrated as the standard reference in the field because of this dual methodology of description and explanation. Each of the subsequent four editions expand the variety and sources of climatic data published. A criticism of the fifth edition, published shortly before Kendrew’s death, is that it failed to keep abreast of contemporary meteorological theory (Rainey, 1962). It nevertheless represented an important source of climatological data and analysis on the world scale, and was found on the bookshelf of many weather forecast stations.
The book is divided into eight parts with numerous chapters within each part. Part I opens with Chapter 1 presenting the major climatic elements such as temperature and precipitation. Numerous definitions of derived variables such as mean annual temperature range are listed, along with examples of the statistical display of climatic data in table or graphical format. This first part concludes with an introductory discussion of pressure, wind systems, air masses and fronts in Chapter 2. All of the Part I material is developed in the succeeding sessions to explain the climates encountered in the world’s continents. Table 3 lists the regionalization utilized in the book, along with the number of separate chapters in each part. Each of the regional parts starts with a chapter addressing the general features of the continent and concludes with a table of temperature and precipitation means. Table 4 lists the chapter headings in the Africa section as an example of the level of detail Kendrew brings to the subject. For the modern reader, the numerous now-antiquated place names are a reminder that geography, including regional climatology, is far from static.
Continental regions of the world’s climates according To Kendrew.
Chapter headings in Kendrew’s Africa continental region.
III Influence of the texts
Each of these works continues to influence geography training today. The Rumney approach correlates climate and vegetation types. It has roots in the phytogeographic work of Köppen and the plant distributions of Blumenstock and Thornthwaite (1941). Some version of the Köppen system continues to be used today in almost all introductory physical geography and general climatology textbooks. It makes a convenient pedagogical tool, but leaves the student lacking a knowledge of the atmospheric processes at work in the area. I believe Schaefer (1953) would not be especially pleased with this approach and Rumney himself would decry the downplay of systematic principles of climate.
Kendrew’s approach is followed in the more specialized regional and synoptic climatology texts of today. Kendrew wrote his book to address the lack of an English-language regional climatology text. In the early 1900s the primary text was Robert De Courcy Ward’s (1903) translation of the first volume of Julius Hann’s 1887 edition of the German-language Handbook of Climatology. This text used a systematic approach but addressed climates by physiographic regions. The brilliance of Kendrew was to recognize the need for a regional climatology accessed by political area yet still retaining the rigour of a systematic approach to climate. Moving forward, the study of regional climatology has been mostly overshadowed by the synoptic, dynamic and modelling approaches (Barry, 1967). Today, climatic data for most places in the world is available in a variety of formats online. However, there still exists a need for such systematic-focused regional climatology texts as Lydolph (1985) and the 15-volume magnum opus World Survey of Climatology (Landsberg, 1969) to place the regional data in a proper systematic context. Kendrew’s areas (Table 3) align nicely with those of Landsberg’s (Table 5), a fitting testament to Kendrew having filled the void.
Volumes in The World Survey of Climatology, HE Landsberg, Editor-in-Chief.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
