Solar Activity and Earth's Atmosphere, a Re-evaluation

The author was always encouraged as a child to have hobbies. These included entomology and chemistry. His school didn't teach chemistry, but the hobby enabled him to join an A-level chemistry class at technical college. Physics, maths, and chemistry A-levels were followed by a physics degree from the University of Kent at Canterbury. During a long vacation term before the 3rd year, reading Sverdrup's 'The Oceans', led to an interest in oceanography and a job with torpedo trials, sonar signal processor and modeling using Fortran. A career change to cost engineering included development of cost analysis software and costing of leading-edge products including infra-red seekers, fuzes, linescans, and cryogenic engines. Manufacturing process modeling with databases and spreadsheets included titanium superplastic forming, thick film ceramic circuit manufacturing, robotics and flexible manufacturing.A return to systems engineering included evaluation of leading-edge systems engineering tools. This was followed by a short period of railway systems engineering then development of defensive aids systems and analysis and documentation of future fast jet radar. On retirement he took up book indexing, following in the footsteps of a much-loved aunt and uncle and developed software for book indexing.Reading history and re-reading university physics and chemistry textbooks led to curiosity about oxygen isotopes in Atacama Desert nitrates and eventually to this book.