The primary resource for students enrolled in my early mesoscale meteorology courses at Purdue University was Mesoscale Meteorology and Forecasting, the edited collection of review articles published by the American Meteorological Society in 1986. Though still valuable, it was conspicuously missing a number of important developments that had taken place since its publication, including: (1) major field programs such as IHOP (International H2O Project), BAMEX (Bow Echo and Mesoscale Convective Vortex Experiment), and VORTEX (Verification of the Origins of Rotation in Tornadoes Experiment) and its successor VORTEX2; (2) the maturation and implementation of operational Doppler weather radar, and an equivalent advancement of airborne and ground-based mobile radar systems; and (3) the relative proliferation of open-source community models and a concurrent ability to run such models using accessible computing resources, including desktop systems.

In short, these and other developments have led to significant evolution in the understanding of the atmospheric mesoscale since 1986, and motivated my effort to produce an updated resource. The realization of this effort is Mesoscale-Convective Processes in the Atmosphere.

As a perusal of the book shows, a major difference between Mesoscale-Convective Processes in the Atmosphere and other newly available mesoscale books is its focus on deep moist convection. This limited focus was driven partly by my perception of student interest, and partly by a philosophical choice to provide a concentrated treatment of a few topics, rather than a diluted treatment of all things mesoscale. Of course, it also follows my own interests, which most certainly biased the directions of some explanations (as in my considerable use of numerical modeling results, for example), although I did strive for balance as much as possible.