Customer Reviews

The USA Today Weather Book: An Easy-to-Understand Guide to the USA's Weather

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Reading this book is a lot like watching a TV weather report. It is concise yet entertaining, and it is always accurate down to every detail. The colorful graphics and the easy to understand explanations make this book a winner. I constantly refer viewers that call me with questions about weather to this book. If you only buy one book in your life about weather, buy this one, you won't be disappointed!

A simply wonderful book to better understand (almost) all there is to know about weather. Large, clear graphics help illustrate some of the more difficult topics, occasional little weather tid bits thrown in for fun, and easy-to-read style makes this book a must have for anyone wanting to learn more about our atmosphere. I've even used this book to teach a "Weather for Non-Science Majors" college course.

A very exceptional book with regards to an introduction to weather and meteorology. Three dimensional drawings and plain language make understanding weather systems much more understandable. A great aid for weather chasers and pilots who want to understand more about the weather ;)

I do not understand these favorable reviews. This book is terribly disorganized. It jumps from subject to subject and does not teach or explain weather systems in an understandable manner. Though it is filled with fun facts and sidebars, it does not lay down fundamentals and then build on these fundamentals, which is the basis of any scientific text. Unfortunately I have not found a better laymen's text on weather and weather systems.

Bits and pieces of weather are put together systematically. Never too brief. Never too technical. A must-read for all laymen interested in weather on earth.

The text and colourful pictures succinctly explain how the different weather systems form on earth. Though the book's focus is on US weather, many of the theories, principles and processes explained apply to other locations too.

If you have ever wanted to learn the how's and why's of weather, this is the book for you. You will understand everything you need to know about how storms form, highs and lows, jet stream, usa weather patterns, coriolis effect, thunderstorms, lightning, tornadoes, hurricanes, wind, and so on. This book is very easy to read and understand and has excellent graphics for helping you to see what is being written about. There are college courses that use this book as their textbook (DU Forecasting and Meteorology). I have used this book to help me in teaching 9th grade Meteorology.

I'm a big weather fan and I can never find exactly what I want to know in other weather books. But this book, with it's great pictures and interesting facts, had a lot of answers to my questions and more. I think every weather fan should read it.

First of all, let me say that I normally think of the U.S.A. Today newspaper as a cheap news sources that only should be read if desperate for reading material at the airport. With that said, I will say they do have excellent graphics for explaining weather events and that has transerred to this book. I teach a university weather/climate course and use the figures frequently, they are much better than any other text. Plus, they provide explanations that deviate from the jargon I had hammered into my head during my academic past.

This was a great book. It used pictures very effectively and the graphics were superb. It really tried to decomplicate the weather and it was very readable even for a weather novice.

Like an Impressionist painting, a cursory glance at this book might make it appear you are viewing a highly-detailed piece of work, but upon closer inspection it's revealed to be little more than collection of seemingly random components. If you want to step back and dedicate endless hours of reading in order to get little more than a general overview of weather, then this book will do the trick. However, if you want anything close to a thorough understanding of meteorological events, I suggest you look elsewhere.

All the big, colorful and user-friendly-looking graphics are deceptive, as are the many sidebar stories and small sub-sections that suggest everything is explained in easy-to-understand building blocks. In truth, this book is a frustrating mess. It is not cohesive; very little follows in a logical format. Using arithmetic as an analogy, if this were a basic math book, a chapter might start by patiently explaining how one plus two equals three. Right when you think you have a firm grasp of this concept, the next sub-section would begin with the introduction of calculus: the presumed assumption being that since you can fathom basic addition, you can now extrapolate everything between it and calculus. It's not that the book is lacking in information, nor that it contains too much. It's merely a matter of how the information is presented. It's almost as if the author, a Mr. Jack Williams of USA Today, does not truly expect you to absorb or understand this information, so he simply tosses it within the pages for good measure; obligatorily, if you will. "Okay, I'll just have to take your word for it," is all a reader can ultimately say with a sigh after wrestling with one of his vague explanations of a crucial weather phenomenon.

For that reason, this attractive book more or less "pretends" to teach you about weather when, in fact, all it's really doing is telling you about it. To that end, all these aforementioned graphics (which make the book look so appealing) often create more confusion than clarity when coupled with the text. Sometimes they seem wholly unrelated to the text; sometimes they seem to contradict the text; sometimes they simply seem utterly pointless.

The best thing about the book, however, was that it served as a jumping-off-point for online research into the topics and concepts it presented. However, a "For Dummies" or "For Idiots" book would serve the same purpose, but without the time-consuming pretense that it was a comprehensive exploration of the subject of weather.

So, again, if you want something that looks good on your coffee table and is fun to glance at every once in a while, go for it. But if you really want to fully embrace what's happening in the skies above, don't waste your time with The Weather Book.