Problems in the Classification of Climates

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Abstract
Climatic types are said to be to climate what air-mass types are to weather. There is thus a close parallelism between modern efforts at classification of climates and recent work of meterorologists on the classification of air masses. Progress in the classification of climates from the earlier literature to that of 1942, with data drawn copiously from the works of W. K6ppen, is reviewed and critically analyzed (bibliographic footnotes). If it were not for the fact that vegetation and soils integrate the various climatic elements, the complexity of climate would raise almost insuperable obstacles to the development of a rational classification. The result of such an integration is considered to be a classification of climate, not one of vegetation climatically explained, as has sometimes been asserted. Geographers have concerned themselves with climate because they have believed that there are, on the earth'' s surface, natural climatic regions that are reasonably homogeneous and that have boundaries which can be identified in terms of limits of plant communities, soil groups, and land-form types, and can be defined in terms of numerical climatic data. "The value of any climatic classification depends, first, on the accuracy with which the climatic regions are identified and their boundaries located, and second, on the skill with which numerical data are selected to match these boundaries. A climatic scheme can be evaluated by these two tests and by them alone.