Global Climate

Climate research has undergone dramatic changes in the last decades and a major­ ity of the knowledge being produced tends to be lost among the vast amount of journals and dissemination papers or, at most has a short virtual life from time to time on the internet. It was in an attempt to summarize the state of the art in the climate sciences that a conference was first held in Barcelona in 1999 from which this book eventually saw light. The meeting was held with the aim of enriching the scientific debate on the climate sciences in our geographical area. The conference had in its initials, my own personal experience in several climate labs abroad and, a willingness to bring what was enlightening from that experience. The support and encouragement I received from some of the reputed colleagues who later at­tended the meeting and eventually contributed to this book was particularly impor­tant. This book was first devised as a recopilatory of the talks given in that sympo­sium, but 1 sincerely think that the final product is even considerably better than what was originally thought of at first. In fact this improvement is clear as, to the original seven chapters, four new ones were added at several different stages of development. The focus that each of the authors was asked to give to their chapter, intended to highlight those areas where there were gaps in climate knowledge and where research was currently pushing strongly.