The Weather Experiment

Download or read book The Weather Experiment written by Peter Moore and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2015-06-02 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A history of weather forecasting, and an animated portrait of the nineteenth-century pioneers who made it possible By the 1800s, a century of feverish discovery had launched the major branches of science. Physics, chemistry, biology, geology, and astronomy made the natural world explicable through experiment, observation, and categorization. And yet one scientific field remained in its infancy. Despite millennia of observation, mankind still had no understanding of the forces behind the weather. A century after the death of Newton, the laws that governed the heavens were entirely unknown, and weather forecasting was the stuff of folklore and superstition. Peter Moore's The Weather Experiment is the account of a group of naturalists, engineers, and artists who conquered the elements. It describes their travels and experiments, their breakthroughs and bankruptcies, with picaresque vigor. It takes readers from Irish bogs to a thunderstorm in Guanabara Bay to the basket of a hydrogen balloon 8,500 feet over Paris. And it captures the particular bent of mind—combining the Romantic love of Nature and the Enlightenment love of Reason—that allowed humanity to finally decipher the skies.

Download or read book The Secret World of Weather: How to Read Signs in Every Cloud, Breeze, Hill, Street, Plant, Animal, and Dewdrop (Natural Navigation) written by Tristan Gooley and published by The Experiment, LLC. This book was released on 2023-02-28 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Learn to “see” the forecast in the hidden weather signs all around you—from the New York Times–bestselling author of How to Read a Tree and The Lost Art of Reading Nature’s Signs In The Secret World of Weather, bestselling author Tristan Gooley turns his gaze up to the sky, bringing his signature brand of close observation and eye-opening deduction to the fascinating world of weather. Every cloud, every change in temperature, every raindrop, every sunbeam, every breeze reveals something about our weather—if you know what to look for. Before you know it, you’ll be able to forecast impending storms, sunny days, and everything in between, all without needing to consult your smartphone. But The Secret World of Weather goes far beyond mere weather prediction, changing the very way we think about weather itself. Weather is not something that blankets an area; rather, it changes constantly as you walk through woods or turn down a street. The weather is never identical on two sides of a tree—or even beneath it. Take, for example, Gooley’s remarkable discovery that breezes accelerate beneath a tree. To Gooley, this is “weather,” a tiny microclimate that explains why people sit beneath a tree to cool down—not only for the shade but, subconsciously, for cooler breeze. And so Gooley shows us not only what the weather will be like five days from now, but also what to expect about the weather around every corner. By carefully observing the subtle interplay of wind, cloud, fog, temperature, rain and many other phenomena, we not only form a deeper understanding of weather patterns, but also unlock secrets about our environment. Weather forms our landscape, and landscape forms our weather. Everything we see in the sky reflects where we are. When we learn to read weather’s signs, Gooley shows us, the weather becomes our map, revealing to us how it has made our towns, cities, woods, and hills what they are. You’ll never see your surroundings the same way again.

Download or read book The Weather Machine written by Andrew Blum and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2019-06-25 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the acclaimed author of Tubes, a lively and surprising tour through the global network that predicts our weather, the people behind it, and what it reveals about our climate and our planet The weather is the foundation of our daily lives. It’s a staple of small talk, the app on our smartphones, and often the first thing we check each morning. Yet, behind all these humble interactions is the largest and most elaborate piece of infrastructure human beings have ever constructed—a triumph of both science and global cooperation. But what is the weather machine, and who created it? In The Weather Machine, Andrew Blum takes readers on a fascinating journey through the people, places, and tools of forecasting, exploring how the weather went from something we simply observed to something we could actually predict. As he travels across the planet, he visits some of the oldest and most important weather stations and watches the newest satellites blast off. He explores the dogged efforts of forecasters to create a supercomputer model of the atmosphere, while trying to grasp the ongoing relevance of TV weather forecasters. In the increasingly unpredictable world of climate change, correctly understanding the weather is vital. Written with the sharp wit and infectious curiosity Andrew Blum is known for, The Weather Machine pulls back the curtain on a universal part of our everyday lives, illuminating our changing relationships with technology, the planet, and our global community.

Download or read book Moose Mischief written by Danielle Gillespie-Hallinan and published by Typeworm Publishing. This book was released on 2017-10-27 with total page 32 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cooper has the clever idea of making his mom pancakes for her birthday, and his friend the moose offers to help. The moose claims he's the best chef in Alaska, but is he really? Find out if Cooper's mom is happy about the surprise awaiting her in the kitchen!

Download or read book Rain written by Cynthia Barnett and published by Crown. This book was released on 2016-04-05 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rain is elemental, mysterious, precious, destructive. It is the subject of countless poems and paintings; the top of the weather report; the source of the world's water. Yet this is the first book to tell the story of rain. Cynthia Barnett's Rain begins four billion years ago with the torrents that filled the oceans, and builds to the storms of climate change. It weaves together science—the true shape of a raindrop, the mysteries of frog and fish rains—with the human story of our ambition to control rain, from ancient rain dances to the 2,203 miles of levees that attempt to straitjacket the Mississippi River. It offers a glimpse of our "founding forecaster," Thomas Jefferson, who measured every drizzle long before modern meteorology. Two centuries later, rainy skies would help inspire Morrissey’s mopes and Kurt Cobain’s grunge. Rain is also a travelogue, taking readers to Scotland to tell the surprising story of the mackintosh raincoat, and to India, where villagers extract the scent of rain from the monsoon-drenched earth and turn it into perfume. Now, after thousands of years spent praying for rain or worshiping it; burning witches at the stake to stop rain or sacrificing small children to bring it; mocking rain with irrigated agriculture and cities built in floodplains; even trying to blast rain out of the sky with mortars meant for war, humanity has finally managed to change the rain. Only not in ways we intended. As climate change upends rainfall patterns and unleashes increasingly severe storms and drought, Barnett shows rain to be a unifying force in a fractured world. Too much and not nearly enough, rain is a conversation we share, and this is a book for everyone who has ever experienced it.

Download or read book Fixing the Sky written by James Rodger Fleming and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2010-08-13 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Weaving together stories from elite science, cutting-edge technology, and popular culture, Fleming examines issues of health and navigation in the 1830s, drought in the 1890s, aircraft safety in the 1930s, and world conflict since the 1940s.

Download or read book Our Biggest Experiment written by Alice Bell and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2021-09-21 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traversing science, politics, and technology, Our Biggest Experiment shines a spotlight on the little-known scientists who sounded the alarm to reveal the history behind the defining story of our age: the climate crisis. Our understanding of the Earth's fluctuating environment is an extraordinary story of human perception and scientific endeavor. It also began much earlier than we might think. In Our Biggest Experiment, Alice Bell takes us back to climate change science's earliest steps in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, through the point when concern started to rise in the 1950s and right up to today, where the “debate” is over and the world is finally starting to face up to the reality that things are going to get a lot hotter, a lot drier (in some places), and a lot wetter (in others), with catastrophic consequences for most of Earth's biomes. Our Biggest Experiment recounts how the world became addicted to fossil fuels, how we discovered that electricity could be a savior, and how renewable energy is far from a twentieth-century discovery. Bell cuts through complicated jargon and jumbles of numbers to show how we're getting to grips with what is now the defining issue of our time. The message she relays is ultimately hopeful; harnessing the ingenuity and intelligence that has driven the history of climate change research can result in a more sustainable and bearable future for humanity.