Customer Reviews

Extreme Weather: A Guide and Record Book

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4 star:		(1)
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This is the book a weather nut like me wished he had thought to write first. Great maps and photos, tables of data, and he asks for corrections, publishing them, with updates, at www.extremeweatherguide.com .
The photos, such as Lincoln, NE, summer 1936, are spectacular, as are his colored maps of everything (wettest and driest spots by state is one example).

He even has NYC data from the mid 19th Century, with "the day that never got above zero" Now that takes some hunting to dig up.

A great gift, as well as a wonderful resource. All libraries, as well as anyone interested in the weather should have a copy.

This is a wonderful book on weather. And the extreme values it gives are actually fairly interesting and fun to read about. Besides, we all like to know if we're in the middle of truly unusual weather.

The book starts with heat records for every state, both absolute maximums and July averages. As well as maps showing number of days with 90-degree (Fahrenheit) or higher temperatures. We learn about temperature-humidity indexes, heat waves, and even heat bursts. As well as extremes in temperature ranges. There's information about heat extremes in foreign countries as well.

Next we get to cold weather! Heat records for every state, both absolute minimums and January averages. Cold waves. Wind chill. And international extremes. Did you know that near Lake Vostok, in Antarctica, the temperature once reached minus 128.6 degrees Fahrenheit? Brrrr!

We learn about the snowiest cities. And then we get to rainfall records for a big bunch of American cities. There are also records for varying amounts of time. What's the record for rainfall in 30 minutes? It's over 11 inches! And it fell in Sikeshugou, China. And there's material about floods, thunderstorms, hail, and tornadoes. As well as wind and fog!

There is a fascinating chapter on hurricanes. I vividly remember Hurricane Carol, which struck in August of 1954. And there's a picture of Providence, Rhode Island, after it was hit by the storm surge from that hurricane. There is also an excellent map of the American Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic Ocean coasts, with probabilities per year of being hit by a hurricane, as well as probabilities of being hit by 125 mile-per-hour winds or greater. The five areas that in 2004 that were "overdue" for a hurricane are listed. Of course, as any technical person knows, being "overdue" for a storm does not increase the chance of being hit, if anything, it decreases it. But it does imply that one may be less prepared for one when it does hit. New Orleans is listed as one of the five areas (it was hit by Betsy in 1965 and not hit again until Katrina in 2005). The book explains that the dikes protecting downtown New Orleans, including the French Quarter, from the water in Lake Pontchartrain would almost certainly be overwhelmed by a Category 4 or 5 storm surge. And that if they were, much of that area could be swamped under 20 feet of water. I wish that more people with the responsibility for protecting the city of New Orleans (or voting for its protection) had been more aware of this, so that some of the damage caused by Katrina might have been lessened.

I highly recommend this book.

This is well written with a wealth of easy-to-understand graphics and tables. It is divided into 8 parts: Heat & Drought, Cold, Snow & Ice, Rain & Floods, Thunderstorms & Hail, Tornadoes, Hurricanes, Windstorms, Fog and El Niño-Southern Oscillatiion. Appendices include maps, records and conversion tables.

This is a wealth of information, often shown as very useful maps. The book will have to be updated as information is only presented in pre-1865 inch-pound measuring units and not the US system of measurement, SI or "metric" units. The author presents means and extremes in every category, world wide, complete with anecdotes of luminous snowfall and tornadoes, lightning pranks, heat and cold, storminess, maximum aridity and precipitation. This is not the "end all, be all," but pulls together information that is otherwise scattered in academic texts not normally available to the general public.

Emphasis is on the US and North America. There is no discussion of effective moisture (Index of Moisture, precipitation compared to the climatic demand for moisture, potential and actual evapotranspiration). Recent severe blizzards are chronicled, but a "blizzard" is never defined. Föen or chinook winds are discussed for Colorado and Utah, but ignored for Sierra Nevada and Cascades of WA, OR and CA.

The author points out 1) records will always be broken and 2) unprecedented events do not presage extraordinary explanations. These are two thoughts that should be on the wall of every television, radio, newspaper, magazine and internet weathercaster. This book is a fun read and very handy to have close by.

The ultimate extreme weather guide. Extreme Weather is filled with beautiful photos, easy to read maps and charts and concise, easy to use weather records, organized by city and state. Complimenting the well organized data is an excellent and informative historical text. A must have for any weather enthusiast, Extreme Weather is a valuable resource for the home or office.

I loved this book! The photos are great, nice thick book, and a wealth of info on the coldest, hottest, wettest, windiest, etc. You'll like it if you enjoy weather, records, trivia, reading about geography, etc.
Big color photos, tornadoes, floods, maps, some historic photos too.

This is an excellent book that should actually be used as an accompying text to a regular weather text. The cartography is superb and the data is listed in an easy to understand fashion

This book is about weather extremes, and it does an excellent job of covering the topic.

The focus isn't to wholly describe weather phenomenon or the root causes of weather extremes. It concentrates more on the recorded weather extremes in many geographic locations. Think of it not as a weather encyclopedia but more as a book of world records.

If you or someone you know is a weather enthusiast, this book will be a definite treat. It's definitely a catalyst to kindle the pursuit of more climatologically knowledge.

"Extreme Weather" is a great combination of general meteorology, defining photographs and fabulous factoids. All kinds of interesting information on the wildest weather possible is included. Everything from floods to ice, from snowstorms to sandstorms and all in between. The reader gets a pretty cold view of just how nasty mother nature can be. It's enjoyable reading just in sections or as a whole.

The book features a neatly organized an attractive comination of photographs and text. The well written text presents the reader with valuable information at an easy pace. Anyone interested in nature, the enviornment in general, or meteorology will love this book.

This is a well written and fascinating book on weather extremes. I'm only about 100 pages into it, but I enjoyed it so much I wanted to make a brief comment.

Although the book is mostly about extreme weather phenomena, you'll also learn a lot about more normal types of weather, since if you understand how the more extreme storms are generated, you often can understand how the less severe ones occur as well. But this is done in the context of learning about the more severe and extreme types of weather, which I find an interesting approach. After all, there isn't much when it comes to natural phenomena that's scarier than a hurricane or a tornado (well, earthquakes and tsunamis of course are right up there too, but in weather, they're the kings :-)). I once read that a typical hurricane can release each second 100 times the energy in the first atomic bomb (which was a 20 kiloton bomb).

The book discusses weather extremes from rainfall to tornadoes for the U.S. and the rest of the world, including many fascinating topics, such as internally lit tornadoes that glowed with their own light. Witnesses reported orange lightning bolts coming out of the bottom of the spout which would then be sucked up by the violent winds into the interior, thereby lighting up the entire tornado. There are a couple of photos of these sorts of tornadoes, including a black and white one at night showing two luminous tornadoes that obviously had to be internally lit. Very cool stuff and my only complaint was there weren't more photos like this, but then these are very rare phenomena.

Also, the maximum winds typically don't exceed 325 miles per hour, and most tornadoes are usually more like 75-125 miles per hour. This is just one of the many very interesting topics covered.

Overall a very cool book on weather, and I'll have more to say about it later when I finish the book.

This is an excellent book and affordable. Some other reference books are very expensive and don't have the great photos and data presentations that this book has (I still highly recommend the others, but they are not cheap). This book saves a lot of time and makes it easy to show other people exactly what you are trying to say, and they will be impressed with the quality of this publication. Excellent book in its own right and can easily double as a "coffee table book" and a great conversation starter.