The Weather Machine

From the acclaimed author of Tubes, a lively and surprising tour through the global network that predicts our weather, the people behind it, and what it reveals about our climate and our planet The weather is the foundation of our daily lives. It’s a staple of small talk, the app on our smartphones, and often the first thing we check each morning. Yet, behind all these humble interactions is the largest and most elaborate piece of infrastructure human beings have ever constructed—a triumph of both science and global cooperation. But what is the weather machine, and who created it? In The Weather Machine, Andrew Blum takes readers on a fascinating journey through the people, places, and tools of forecasting, exploring how the weather went from something we simply observed to something we could actually predict. As he travels across the planet, he visits some of the oldest and most important weather stations and watches the newest satellites blast off. He explores the dogged efforts of forecasters to create a supercomputer model of the atmosphere, while trying to grasp the ongoing relevance of TV weather forecasters. In the increasingly unpredictable world of climate change, correctly understanding the weather is vital. Written with the sharp wit and infectious curiosity Andrew Blum is known for, The Weather Machine pulls back the curtain on a universal part of our everyday lives, illuminating our changing relationships with technology, the planet, and our global community.

Who says nobody does anything about the weather? Danny Dunn does! Of course if there hadn't been a drought when Danny went to the weather bureau to return a radiosonde, just maybe nothing would have happened. But has there ever been a time when Danny could contain his curiosity? Danny is naturally attracted to all the weather-forecasting instruments and decides to do some volunteer weather-observing. And when Danny and his friends Joe Pearson and Irene Miller discover that Professor Bullfinch has a new ionic transmitter that makes little clouds and miniature rainstorms, trouble is sure to follow!

The science behind global warming, and its history: how scientists learned to understand the atmosphere, to measure it, to trace its past, and to model its future. Global warming skeptics often fall back on the argument that the scientific case for global warming is all model predictions, nothing but simulation; they warn us that we need to wait for real data, “sound science.” In A Vast Machine Paul Edwards has news for these skeptics: without models, there are no data. Today, no collection of signals or observations—even from satellites, which can “see” the whole planet with a single instrument—becomes global in time and space without passing through a series of data models. Everything we know about the world's climate we know through models. Edwards offers an engaging and innovative history of how scientists learned to understand the atmosphere—to measure it, trace its past, and model its future.

If your children have ever wondered about the weather, this fun and informative book will have them Living in Cloud 9! Windsock Wesley & His Wild & Wonderful Weather Machine provides an exciting peek into how the world's weather systems form. Windsock Wesley, a nutty yet loveable professor-like man, circumnavigates the planet following its weather systems. He is accompanied on the trip by his assistant, Cirrus, a capuchin monkey. Cirrus was named after the cirrus type of clouds, and that's exactly where Wesley and Cirrus live: inside a magic motor home named Cloud 9. But this motor home is unlike any other motor home you've ever seen! It can travel through time and space to find itself anywhere on the planet where wild weather is raging. Wesley finds himself saving the Kayapo tribe from torrential rains in the Amazon. The two save the tribe members, feed them and help rebuild their homes. Wesley advises them to build their new houses on stilts! The book includes a weather glossary to understand weather terms and also discusses weather phenomena such as thunder and lightning, and the incredible things happening in the sky when storms and tornadoes are brewing. Author Alex Fox has been writing professionally for 17 years. She moved from the UK to Qatar a few years ago with her husband, a meteorologist. She plans to write a series of five Windsock Wesley books and then move on to another series Publisher's website: http: //www.strategicpublishinggroup.com/title/WindsockWesley-LivingInCloud9.html

Once upon a time, in a world not so different to ours, a little blue man decides to create a machine to control the weather. It all goes terribly wrong. With humour, subtlety and a sense of adventure, Donovan Bixley's engaging illustrations capture both the hopefulness and naivety of human industry in this wordless book.

Machine Learning Techniques for Space Weather provides a thorough and accessible presentation of machine learning techniques that can be employed by space weather professionals. Additionally, it presents an overview of real-world applications in space science to the machine learning community, offering a bridge between the fields. As this volume demonstrates, real advances in space weather can be gained using nontraditional approaches that take into account nonlinear and complex dynamics, including information theory, nonlinear auto-regression models, neural networks and clustering algorithms. Offering practical techniques for translating the huge amount of information hidden in data into useful knowledge that allows for better prediction, this book is a unique and important resource for space physicists, space weather professionals and computer scientists in related fields. Collects many representative non-traditional approaches to space weather into a single volume Covers, in an accessible way, the mathematical background that is not often explained in detail for space scientists Includes free software in the form of simple MATLAB® scripts that allow for replication of results in the book, also familiarizing readers with algorithms

Weather control. Juxtaposing those two words is enough to raise eyebrows in a world where even the best weather models still fail to nail every forecast, and when the effects of climate change on sea level height, seasonal averages of weather phenomena, and biological behavior are being watched with interest by all, regardless of political or scientific persuasion. But between the late nineteenth century—when the United States first funded an attempt to “shock” rain out of clouds—and the late 1940s, rainmaking (as it had been known) became weather control. And then things got out of control. In Make It Rain, Kristine C. Harper tells the long and somewhat ludicrous history of state-funded attempts to manage, manipulate, and deploy the weather in America. Harper shows that governments from the federal to the local became helplessly captivated by the idea that weather control could promote agriculture, health, industrial output, and economic growth at home, or even be used as a military weapon and diplomatic tool abroad. Clear fog for landing aircraft? There’s a project for that. Gentle rain for strawberries? Let’s do it! Enhanced snowpacks for hydroelectric utilities? Check. The heyday of these weather control programs came during the Cold War, as the atmosphere came to be seen as something to be defended, weaponized, and manipulated. Yet Harper demonstrates that today there are clear implications for our attempts to solve the problems of climate change.