Advances in the Understanding and Prediction of Cyclone Development with Limited-Area Fine-Mesh Models

Since the early scientific theories of the development of extratropical cyclones in the 19th century (Kutzbach 1979), meteorologists have sought a complete and quantitative description of the physics of these atmospheric systems that dominate weather in middle latitudes. The earliest studies were descriptive and based almost entirely on surface observations. With the advent of instrumented aircraft in the early 1930s, operational rawinsondes in the 1940s and satellites in the 1960s, a more complete threedimensional picture of the structure of extratropical cyclones emerged, as described by others in this volume.