Customer Reviews

Marine Weather Forecasting

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i have three problems with this book: organization & presentation of material, depth of material and quality of the book itself.

i'll start with the quality of the book, as it's easiest to explain. when the meat of the 'forecasting' is based upon you being able to read cloud formations, and the pictures of the cloud formations are in black and white and low resolution, it kind of makes the whole thing moot. if you don't already know what alto stratus clouds look like, you're going to run into some problems trying to identify them after looking at a photo that resembles a sonogram.

next, the depth of the material. the meat of the book comes in a chapter that goes over ways to interpret different cloud formations. the material is presented in forty or so bullet point statements, kind of like "if the sky looks like X, then Y will be the weather". now, i'm not saying that the information presented here is necessarily wrong - it's just not really explained. WHY is this the case, you'll ask yourself repeatedly? or maybe you won't. i guess if you have no desire to see the information justified scientifically, you'll be fine with this. personally, i'd like a little science to back up the guidelines presented. the author does occasionally say things such as, "this happens because there is more moisture in the atmosphere, and as a result the sky is red". however explainations are generally too brief for me to consider them to be of real value.

finally, the organization and presentation of the book. honestly, the book isn't terribly well written. the author kind of jumps right into things going from A to B to C without creating a real flow or structure to the material. I found myself saying things like "why is he suddently presenting this material here?" on several occasions. additionally, many people may find parts of the book completely irrelevent, wishing the author took these pages to further explain the good material he does present within the book.

i'd say make a trip to your library before jumping into this one.