( 6 reviews )
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Posted: May 12 2008
Excellent book. Using this along with a couple others to get back into weather forcasting Thank you for an excellent book
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( 6 of 7 found this review helpful ) Posted: May 17 2007
I bought this book in preparation for an advanced mariner's meteorology course, and could not have made this comment without having first gained that higher level of knowledge. This is a suberb book with two major flaws: 1) It sticks to the two-dimensional depiction of weather that is common to the average person. Although there are a couple of illustrations showing altitude, the author could easily have put in a few pages on the rotation of the earth, the 500 mb level, and how weather on the surface cannot be understood without underestanding what is happening at the 18,000 level. As my instructor put it, the high-level troughs are the chicken that hatches the surface level (scrambled) egg. 2) It provides the pictures of the clouds, but missed the key chance to break down the names into the original latin meanings, to create a matrix of high (Cirro), medium (alto), and low (strato), with substantive meaning including layer (stratus), curly (cirrus), stacked in a vertical heap (cumulo-cumulus), and delivering rain (nimbus). Add this little matrix above, and read "Mariner's Guide to the 500-Millibar Chart" by Joe Stenkiewicz and Lee Chesneau, and Google for to find his web site, and you'll have all you need to move to the better three-dimensional interactive viewing of weather and weather charts. I also recommend Understanding Weatherfax
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( 1 of 1 found this review helpful ) Posted: Mar 15 2007
A very handy book for "instant" weather forcasting. Interesting to read and written with a bit of humor. The only shortcoming is the arrangment of the photographs of the different clouds, they are not in logical sequence.
