From the article "Tropical Meteorology" by C. E. Palmer, published in the Compendium of Meteorology (American Meteorological Society, 1951).

The scope and detail of the conflicts is likely to astonish the meteorologist working on high-latitude problems, accustomed as he is to a large measure of agreement on the fundamental descriptions of temperate and high-latitude weather. In the tropics there is not even agreement on the common forms of tropical clouds or on the meteorological conditions accompanying precipitation. It has become the custom to generalize in haste and to reject inconvenient observations at leisure. Large areas of the tropical atmosphere have not been explored by observation and even the better-known areas have not yet yielded statistics of sufficient scope or reliability to justify the tropical parts of the "models" which are incorporated into the textbook descriptions of the general circulation of the atmosphere. In synoptic meteorology, conditions are little better than in climatology. The role of water substance in the genesis of tropical depressions is a matter of dispute, the existence or nonexistence of fronts the subject of irreconcilable speculations. A dynamical meteorology of the tropics can hardly be said to exist.

This passage still rings truer than one might have expected, if one were to have read it in 1951 and tried to imagine what the state of affairs would be like half a century later. This is why I'm working on tropical meteorology.