Weather wonders

My latest book is out - Weather Science. We've had so many books on climate, but relatively few on weather. The distinction is often a puzzle, but it has been summarised in a neat little aphorism: 'climate is what you expect; weather is what you get'. If you look this up online it tends to be attributed to one of two US writers - Mark Twain and the twentieth century SF author, Robert Heinlein. 

Twain did write something a little similar 'Climate lasts all the time and weather only a few days' - but this lacks the effectiveness of the phrase above. Heinlein certainly used the wording in his treacly, 'wisdom'-laden, over-long late book Time Enough for Love, but this wasn't original. It's been suggested instead that it was first penned by Oxford geographer Andrew Herbertson in a 1901 textbook, though as is always the case with such sayings, it is entirely possible it was already in circulation well before that date.

Weather Science, then, takes a look at what we experience from the climate, whether it's the heavy duty stuff such as hurricanes and lightning or the gentler everyday possibilities of whether or not it will rain tomorrow. As well as the different weather phenomena it looks at forecasting and even attempts to modify the weather (on the whole rarely demonstrated with any certainty to work).

Here's a summary from the book's blurb:

Everyone has an interest in the weather, whether it's to check the prospects for a day out or to know when best to harvest a crop. The Earth's weather systems also provide some of the most dramatic forces of nature, from the vast release of energy in a lightning flash to the devastating impact of tornadoes and hurricanes.

For centuries, our only real guide to future weather was folklore, but with the introduction of the first weather forecasts and maps in Victorian times, attempts were made to give some warning of the weather to come. Until relatively recently, these forecasts could be wildly inaccurate - think of Michael Fish's denial that there was a storm on the way the night before the UK's great storm of 1987. This was due to the mathematically chaotic nature of weather systems, first discovered in the 1960s, the understanding of which would transform forecasting from the 1990s and mean that meteorologists became some of the foremost users of supercomputers.

From the crystalline perfection of the snowflake to the transfer of energy from the Sun, science lies at the heart of the weather and our understanding of it. In recent years, weather science has moved to the leading edge with advanced modelling, versatile use of satellite data and a better understanding of mathematical chaos. This is a true example of hot science at work.

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