Customer Reviews

Weather (Nature Company Guides)

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book has wonderful photos of every type of weather from clouds, sun dogs, rainbows, hail, freezing rain, and on and on. Each description is only a page long and includes a photograph. It's easy to understand and doesn't get into too much detail. My 6 year old, although she didn't understand the text, got this book out of the library and liked it so much she wanted a copy of her own -- she loved looking at the different photos. And as an adult, I had to agree with her, it's great just to thumb through as well as read the specifics.

I love this book all about weather, how it occurs, what makes our planet hum. It has helped me read the sky far more clearly & understand daily forecasts. It is filled with gorgeous photographs & easily interpreted diagrams. I never knew there were so many forms of fog!

It has been said "people complain about the weather but never do anything about it." Perhaps that's because they don't know much about it. This book will help you learn more about our weather. I was looking for a book that explained about various weather phenomenon and came across it. I loved it not only because of the pictures and descriptions in the last chapter on various weather types (different kinds of fogs, clouds, storms, precipitation, optical effects, etc), but also for lost of other information covered in the book, but also because the book's other chapters also contained so much excellent information. Subjects like Understanding the Weather (which covers the atmosphere, sources of weather, global wind patterns and different kinds of winds, frontal systems, etc.), Forecasting the Weather (obviously that has never been an exact science!), Changing the Weather, and also a secion on different climates and how humankind and animals adapt.

There are lots of pictures and diagrams in this book which help to explain key weather concepts. One day I will force myself to read this book cover to cover instead of getting sidetracked at all the gorgeous illustrations and pictures in this book, every time I pick it up to read it.

Saw this book on someone's shelf and I picked it up (weather is an interesting topic for me). This book was a page turner. Every topic is well illustrated and to the point. Also, I love how almost every single weather related topic is covered (e.g. green flashes, renewable energy, altitude sickness) among the traditional ones like hurricanes, stages of a thunderstorm, etc.... This book is a must for anyone interested in learning more about our atmosphere and weather.

This book has great pictures and quite a bit of information put into a simple style. My class and I enjoy using it when we teach/learn about weather. It even has a center section that folds out to reveal the picture of a huge tornado. Other than the global warming and global freezing propaganda on the last pages, it is a great book for class, homeschool, or even reading with your children.

This book is a rare find! It is written in such an easy to understand language and style that it will be an excellent resource to own! It is complete and thorough, yet written for upper elementary grades through, and including, adulthood. I would recommend this book for anyone with children or who is interested in learning the "whys" behind the weather.

This Time Life Book is an easy-to-understand guide for the beginning weather enthusiast. Its packed with informative history, pictorials, and side notes of weather! Enjoyed the Field Guide and overall organization of the book.

Please note that this review is actually for Burrough's other book, A Guide to the Weather, published by Fog City Books. I'm posting the review here since it doesn't come up on any of the other searches I tried. So I apologize for that in advance. But as this is a good book, I wanted to at least write about it here.

This is a beautifully illustrated and attractive volume that recalls the DK books of recent years. It seems publishers are going all out on the design front to make their books more visually appealing than the competition's. Besides pure aesthetics, I'm not sure why this is, but no doubt it helps differentiate their books from the competition, since basic science books pretty much have to present the same information.

Also, the books appear to be getting bigger, longer, and thicker. It's almost as if the publishers have concluded that for a special topic like this, it's the only book on meteorology the average person will ever buy, and so they're going all out to make their book bigger, better, more attractively designed and illustrated, than the competition, hoping they'll choose theirs over the others. Having worked in the publishing industry for 7 years, I have some background in book design, but that was 20 years ago, and things have probably changed a lot, but that's the impression I get from looking at these sorts of science books for the layman.

This is actually written by a team of authors, so it's really a group effort. Each chapter is written by a particular author, although one author (whose name escapes me) writes more than one chapter. The book is divided into eight chapters covering the traditional meteorological topics such as typical weather phenomena, basic forecasting and prediction, and some history. More modern developments are covered in the sections on Adapting to the Weather, Evolution and Climate, Electronic Instrumentation, Seasonal Forecasts, and The Future of Forecasting.

Climatology is covered in a nice section, which discusses the different types, from tropical to semi-arid to desert to arctic. Also, there are sections on Coping with Cold, Coping with Heat, and Coping with High Altitude, and on weather modification. (BTW, a little trivia here, the brother of fiction author, Kurt Vonnegut, is the inventor of cloud seeding and won the medal of the American Association of Meteorologists for this contribution).

However, one subject I didn't see covered was on fronts, although perhaps I just missed that part, since I didn't read every section, since some of them were redundant for me and I already knew about.

Most of the specific topics are covered in two-page spreads, with a number of these making up a chapter. These vary in length, the biggest one being the one on cloud types, which illustrates dozens of different types of clouds, several of which, unless you're a previous student of meteorology, you probably haven't heard of before, such as mammatus, kelvin, lenticular, pyrocumulus, and so on. The photo illustrations here are also excellent.

One minor quip here; I didn't see a spread for noctilucent clouds, which are caused by meteoric dust in the upper atmosphere. These are usually only visible at dawn or dusk. Most meteors burn up in the Mesosphere, a warm layer about 50 miles up, above the stratosphere but below the ionosphere. However, that being said, this was the best coverage of cloud types I've seen so far. The author also explains where they occur and how and why they form.

Almost one-third of the book is devoted to the section on "Weather in Action" and those chapters, which cover dew, fog, frost, clouds and cloud phenomena, storms, drought, floods, and optical effects in the atmosphere, such as coronas, halos, irridescence, sun dogs, etc. Finally, there is a Resources section at the end with suggestions for the further reading, and an index and glossary.

Overall, a well written and beautifully illustrated book on the weather, covering the subject in a thorough yet fairly non-technical way that should be accessible to most readers.

a GOOD BOOK TO READ. eVEN THOUGH THE INDEX IS NOT COMPLETE, THERE IS A LOT OF INFORMATION CRAMMED INTO A LESS THAN 300 PAGE BOOK.