Dr Jun-Ichi Yano works at the Centre National de Recherches Météorologiques, Météo-France in Toulouse. He received his PhD in meteorology from Kyoto University in Japan. After his PhD, he held research internships at MIT and NCAR (National Center for Atmospheric Research) in the United States, the University of Hamburg in Germany, and Monash University in Australia, among others.

Dr Jun-Ichi Yano has many years of experience working on large-scale dynamics in the atmosphere, atmospheric convection as well as processes in the Earth's lithosphere and planetary interiors. His research interests range from theoretical studies of vorticity dynamics to numerical weather prediction and cloud microphysics. He is co-editor (with Prof Robert Plant of the University of Reading) of the book "Parameterisation of Atmospheric Convection". He is currently working on another one titled "Geophysical Convection Dynamics" (Elsevier 2023).

Lecture summary:

It is an interesting question how the Earth's weather would change if the Earth were to rotate around its axis at times other than 24 hours. In fact, this is one of the fundamental questions of atmospheric physics: the role of the Earth's rotation is so fundamental to weather processes that it is the subject of intense scientific research all the time.

We can try to answer the above question in a rather simple way: by observing weather processes on other planets and satellites in the Solar System. The planet Venus and Saturn's largest moon Titan rotate around their own axis more slowly than the Earth, while Jupiter and Saturn rotate much faster. But would the same weather processes occur on Earth as on these planets if the Earth rotated at a comparable speed? To answer this question we need to understand better how weather works. This lecture is an introduction to planetary meteorology presented from this perspective.