Meteorology is the science and study of the earth's atmosphere and its interaction with the earth and all forms of life.

It embraces a wide range of time and space scales, from the tiniest turbulent eddies, which survive as recognisable entities for only a second or two, to the variations in ice cover and the global climatic fluctuations, which extend over millennia.

It seeks to understand and to predict for the benefit of mankind the behaviour of weather, the climate and the atmosphere in general, from the surfaces of land and sea to the edge of space.