Hardcover, 224 pages
English language
Published Jan. 27, 2019 by HarperCollins Canada, Limited.
For readers of The Secret Life of Trees and Tom Vanderbilt’s Traffic, a positive forecast about weather and those who report on it
The Weather Machine chronicles Andrew Blum’s exploration of the world of weather and the people who watch it. Drawing on the immersive tradition of John McPhee, the first-person explanatory science reporting of Mary Roach and Elizabeth Kolbert, the intellectual explorations of James Gleick and Jim Holt, and the unique travelogue of Blum’s own first book, Tubes, Blum takes readers on a journey deep into the weather report. He visits some of the world’s most far-off weather stations and watches the newest satellites blast off. He explores the dogged efforts of computational forecasters to create a living supercomputer model of the atmosphere by dialing in tens of thousands of constantly shifting variables. And he dives inside the weather app on your phone to see how the cloud in …
For readers of The Secret Life of Trees and Tom Vanderbilt’s Traffic, a positive forecast about weather and those who report on it
The Weather Machine chronicles Andrew Blum’s exploration of the world of weather and the people who watch it. Drawing on the immersive tradition of John McPhee, the first-person explanatory science reporting of Mary Roach and Elizabeth Kolbert, the intellectual explorations of James Gleick and Jim Holt, and the unique travelogue of Blum’s own first book, Tubes, Blum takes readers on a journey deep into the weather report. He visits some of the world’s most far-off weather stations and watches the newest satellites blast off. He explores the dogged efforts of computational forecasters to create a living supercomputer model of the atmosphere by dialing in tens of thousands of constantly shifting variables. And he dives inside the weather app on your phone to see how the cloud in the sky becomes the cloud on your screen.
Worth reading, but not as good as it could have been. Some parts could have used more attention and detail, while others (especially the sometimes lengthy descriptions of people and places the author visited while writing) could have used less.
