Weather For Dummies - John D. Cox

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temperatures are getting to be extreme. These are the weather celebrities that get all the media attention: tornadoes, heatwaves, ice storms. In Part 2, you find a chapter devoted to hurricanes, perhaps the biggest weather celebrity of all.

      But behind every storm and every heatwave and every cold snap is a cast of characters that are responsible for the whole production. They make the winds blow. They form the clouds. Chapter 5 answers the question, “why all this wind?” and explains how air pressure is the cause. In Chapter 6, you pick up a little Latin: cirrus, stratus, cumulus, nimbus. Can you tell one type of cloud from another? This chapter also gives you the lowdown on all forms of clouds and how you can tell if there’s rain on the way or something a bit more sinister brewing. And there are two pages of color photographs in this book devoted to the basic cloud types that are spelled out in this part.

      If you live in the same part of the world very long, eventually you get fairly set in your ways about what to expect of the different seasons through the year. Winter, spring, summer, and fall have certain personalities, certain kinds of storms, certain ranges of temperature. And fair weather has a different feel to it from one season to the next.

      Part 3 is organized around this general idea about different seasons coming in different varieties of weather. It begins with the big storms of winter, focuses on the tornadoes of spring and the thunderstorms and temperature extremes of summer, and it takes a good look at hurricanes that reach their seasonal peak in autumn. It is helpful as far as it goes, this way of organizing our thoughts, but it’s worth remembering that every region of the globe has its own variety of seasons.

      

The seasons don’t really “arrive” at the same time and in the same place around the world, and they don’t really act quite the same everywhere. Winter in the Northern Hemisphere is summertime in the Southern Hemisphere. The closer you live to the Equator, the less pronounced are the seasonal differences, although still there are wet seasons and dry seasons. Likewise, the polar regions, above 60 degrees north or south latitude, get only cool, glancing visits from the Sun all year long. Only the middle latitudes, north and south, get the full effects of the seasons.

      But it’s not just latitude, you know, your distance from the Equator, that shapes the seasons. Early New England settlers learned that the hard way, having left England expecting to land in a climate akin to the south of France. As it happens, Sacramento, California, has the same latitude as Washington, D.C., on the other side of the continent, yet all their seasons are very different from one another. Chapter 10 tells you why.

      Something else is going on with the seasons. Changes in the composition of our atmosphere are changing these annual climate patterns. Winters are getting shorter, summers are getting longer, and the arrival times of all seasons are less reliable than they used to be. So look at Part 3 as a set of flexible guidelines that are subject to change, as a way of organizing some thinking about the weather events in your life.

      

Now we know what the weather of a changing climate will be like. Just look at what prolonged drought and rising heat have done to the forests and wilderness of Australia and western North America. Thousands of square miles of natural habitat have been devoured by raging fires and millions of wild creatures have been lost. Hurricanes and other tropical cyclones are becoming bigger and more dangerous, moving more slowly over land and causing more flooding. Wets are getting wetter; hots are getting hotter. The Arctic is rapidly losing its ice cover, breaking down the polar wind pattern that usually keeps frigid air from wandering south into the middle latitudes. More ominously, Greenland is rapidly losing its ice sheet, a circumstance that could hasten sea-level rise and disrupt the Atlantic Ocean’s conveyor of warm ocean currents to Northern Europe. Scientists expect other abrupt surprises along the way.

      There’s a lot going on in the sky. Unfortunately for people who live in many major cities, the sky over their heads is clogged with extra gases and other material that has been dumped into it. Weather doesn’t put that stuff up there, of course, but it sure has a lot to do with how bad it gets. Chapter 14 takes a deep dive into air pollution and looks at all that stuff in the sky that didn’t used to be there and doesn’t belong there.

      When the sky is clear of pollution, however, there are some marvelous things going on. Effects like rainbows and sun dogs and haloes that form around the Sun and the moon have been drawing rave reviews as long as people have been looking up. Part 5 describes how the atmosphere bends the light and plays all sorts of tricks on our eyes.

      Are you thinking about getting up close and personal with the weather? This part also describes cool weather experiments and famous weather experimenters and takes a look at what you need to set up your own weather station.

      There is weather, and then there is weather. Once in a while, a storm or climate event like a drought comes along that is so terrible that it is remembered from one generation to another. It makes history. Part 6 takes a look at the most destructive storms in recent memory in the United States and around the world that made the weather hall of fame.

      Where do you go from here? Weather data and other information about the weather is a huge part of the Internet, and in the Appendix, you can find a list of major weather websites to get you started in the right direction.

      Forecasts and Forecasting

      IN THIS CHAPTER

      

Weathering the forecast

      

Wising up to the key words

      

Trying out the tools

      

Going places with a weather map

      Accurately and precisely forecasting weather is a very hard thing to do. In fact, a 100 percent accurate forecast is impossible.

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