El Clima del Suroeste Bonaerens, and: Clima Urbano de Bahía Blanca (review)

Approximately five hundred kilometers southwest of Greater Buenos Aires, Bahía Blanca is a bustling city of 275,000 inhabitants and the site of the Universidad Nacional del Sur, where research focuses on the society and the environment of this southern segment of the province of Buenos Aires. Showcases of the environmental studies conducted there are the subjects these two monographs.

For the nostalgic reader, the first will be a delight. Not only the structure of the work but also its methodology is a simile of the climatologies written in the 1950s, including quaint wind roses, graphs of humidity indices, and the mandatory meteorological tables in the annex. From a systemic viewpoint, there is nothing new and the insertion of the regional climate around Bahía Blanca into the general atmospheric circulation of the southern tip of the continent is elementary. In this absence of fitting in with the larger picture resides the work's major shortcoming. Moreover, this is something inexcusable, for the authors hardly made any use of a plethora of international publications on this subject. References to the numerous contributions on Argentine climate dynamics produced by noted meteorologists of the Universidad de Buenos Aires, like Vicente Barros, Rosa Compagnucci, and Walter Vargas are conspicuously absent from the scant and dated bibliography.

Slightly better is the monograph on the urban climate of Bahía Blanca. Several of the reported original findings are useful in that they can be placed in a continental or global context to detect similarities with, or deviations from, patterns found in other city climates. Otherwise, the volume abounds in common places, and often, insistence on description instead of interpretation detracts from the significance of the findings themselves. In the opinion of this reviewer, the best part of this volume deals with the relationship between particular synoptic situations and cases of mortality. However, there are also methodological inconsistencies. Instead of dealing first with weather as the cause of increased morbidity, the treatment goes straight from the impact of extreme weather events on old population cohorts. Another conceptual misstep arises from the fact that the chapter that brings humans into the scene is totally disassociated from other chapters dealing with urban wind-canyons, comfort thresholds, and urban heat islands. It seems that this volume consists of several pre-existing monographs, which were glued together without any provision of linkages or a guiding thread.

These two works are proof that writing good and encompassing climatologies continues to be a difficult task fraught with methodological or conceptual traps and opened to interpretative errors. Inexperienced authors tend to dwell on irrelevant details instead of extracting the climatic essence of a region, one that can be placed into the major context of zonal and continental circulations.