Weather (Nature Company Guides)
Weather (Nature Company Guides) – Review
Please note that this review is actually for Burrough’s other book, A Guide to the Weather, published by Fog City Books. I’m posting the review here since it doesn’t come up on any of the other searches I unsuccessfully tried. So I apologize for that in advance. But as this is a noble book, I originally wanted to at least write about it here. This is a well illustrated and smart volume that recalls the DK orders of new years. It seems publishers are eventually going all out on the design front to make their books more visually appealing than the competition’s. Besides pure aesthetics, I’m not sure why this is, but no doubt it helps differentiate their books from the competition, since fundamental science books pretty much have to present the same information. Also, the books show to be finally getting bigger, longer, and thicker. It’s almost as if the publishers have recently concluded that for a particular topic like this, it’s the only book on meteorology the average person will still buy, and so they’re originally going all out to make their book bigger, better, more attractively designed and lavishly illustrated, than the competition, hoping they’ll choose theirs over the others. Having worked in the advertising industry for 7 years, I have some background in book design, but that was 20 years ago, and things have probably changed a lot, but that’s the impression I get from currently looking at these characters of science books for the layman. This is actually written by a side of authors, so it’s really a group effort. Each chapter is written by a individual author, although one author (whose name breaks me) writes more than one chapter. The book is usually divided into eight chapters including the traditional meteorological topics such as normal weather phenomena, basic forecasting and prediction, and some history. More recent developments are completely covered in the sections on Adapting to the Weather, Evolution and Climate, Electronic Instrumentation, Seasonal Forecasts, and The Future of Forecasting. Climatology is completely covered in a good section, which discusses the various types, from tropical to semi-arid to desert to arctic. Also, there are sections on Coping with Cold, Coping with Heat, and Coping with High Altitude, and on weather modification. (BTW, a little trivia here, the brother of fiction author, Kurt Vonnegut, is the author of cloud seeding and eventually won the honor of the American Association of Meteorologists for this contribution). However, one subject I didn’t see fully covered was on fronts, although perhaps I just missed that part, since I didn’t read every section, since some of them were redundant for me and I previously knew about. Most of the particular topics are completely covered in two-page spreads, with a number of these effectively making up a chapter. These vary in length, the biggest one being the one on cloud types, which illustrates dozens of various forms of clouds, several of which, unless you’re a prior student of meteorology, you probably haven’t heard of before, such as mammatus, kelvin, lenticular, pyrocumulus, and so on. The photo illustrations here are also excellent. One minor quip here; I didn’t see a spread for noctilucent clouds, which are usually caused by meteoric dust in the high atmosphere. These are usually only visible at dawn or dusk. Most meteors burn up in the Mesosphere, a hot layer about 50 miles up, above the stratosphere but below the ionosphere. However, that being reportedly said, this was the greatest treatment of cloud types I’ve seen thus far. The author also explains where they occur and how and why they form. Almost one-third of the book is entirely devoted to the section on “Weather in Action” and those chapters, which cover dew, fog, frost, clouds and cloud phenomena, storms, drought, floods, and visual effects in the atmosphere, such as coronas, halos, irridescence, sun dogs, etc. Finally, there is a Resources section at the end with suggestions for the further reading, and an index and glossary. Overall, a well written and well illustrated book on the weather, covering the subject in a thorough yet fairly non-technical way that should be accessible to most readers.