Customer Reviews

How's The Weather?: Find Your Outdoors Comfort Paradise in the U.S.

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How's The Weather?: Find Your Outdoors Comfort Paradise In The U.S. is a handy, practical, guide to selecting the right locale for a picnic, a weekend outing, two week's vacation, or any other recreational getaway so as not to have outdoor entertainment spoiled by a run of bad weather. Historical U.S. climate data is compiled and distilled in a format accessible to the lay reader. Judging weather is an imprecise science and does require some understanding of mathematical analysis, at least if one is using the formulas and data presented here. Overall however, you will not find a guide that takes such a complex subject as meteorology and distills it down into a simpler set of rules and guidelines than this one, at least not without sacrificing accuracy. How's The Weather? is a fascinating book for meteorology buffs as well as the non-specialist general reader trying to plan their vacation anywhere in the U.S.

Those of us from northern states (I'm from Wisconsin) are often only dimly aware of weather patterns in other parts of the country. We assume "the South" is hot most of the time, "the West" is dry, and "the East" is pretty much the same as we are just worse ... hotter in the summer, colder and damper in the winter.

This creates a problem when we plan our vacations. What's the weather like in Florida in March, compared to July? Or Arizona in December compared to May? "How's the Weather" is intended to answer those questions, and it does so with astonishing precision. The author constructs a "comfort index" that takes into account temperature and humidity, sets "perfect" equal to zero, and draws isoline contour maps to show how far from perfect every part of the country is in any given month. Later in the book, tables present average temperature and precipitation for more than 300 cities for every month.

The book ends with some discussion of discussion of some scientific and weather issues that are "off the beaten path," including a very good and precise discussion of climate change. The book itself is oversized, nicely bound so it stays open while in use, and has some clever writing. Anyone who is a weather fanatic will have to have a copy of this book.