Preface
In this book, I am attempting to provide a small contribution to awareness of the Earth by analyzing the European region’s climate and the ongoing climate change process. The Earth’s climate is changing increasingly in the twenty-first century, and this gives special topicality to the chosen theme. The subject is approached as simply as possible from the viewpoint of generic climate classification methods. Among these, I chose the revised Thornthwaite-type Feddema’s (2005) method since it seems to be an effective tool not only for continental but for regional scale analyses also. However, before this, I give an extensive discussion of the method’s most important features. The method is applied to both the twentieth and twenty-first centuries treating not only climate type distributions but also the processes of climate change. Regional scale analyses are performed for the Central European region focusing on the role of terrain effects.