An Air Trip You Wouldn't Want to Miss
Weather Made Clear
By Captain David C. Holmes
- Damn, this paragraph is amazing - I need to note it down.
- Why is this so beautiful! I wish I had read this earlier.
- If I ever write a book, it has to be as inspiring as this!
It isn't possible to rate this book out of 5 stars or 10. We need more of them from the galaxy.
You'll know it when you read it!
Now if I write about this book the way conventional book reviews are, you'd probably get bored because I'd just be clamouring that it is one of the best non-fiction books and that you too must read it. So to avoid that, I'll pick out a few lines, a paragraph or two from each of the 15 chapters of WEATHER Made Easy to prove that this is a masterpiece (and also satisfy my vested interest of noting down my favourite parts)!
Chapter 1: The Last Unexplored Ocean
Over our Earth lies a vast, uncharted, shoreless sea. It undulates softly over the green and brown land bringing to us rain from the oceans, heat from the deserts, and cold from the arctic snow. Often this sea moves quietly without waves, but sometimes it rushes by with a terrifying force at speeds up to 200 miles per hour.....
The life-giving atmosphere not only protects us from lethal radiation and provides us with air but it also filters out most of what is happening in outer space. Until recently man has been like a deep-sea fish peering upward at the light above, only dimly aware of the great universe beyond. The first journeys into space are providing the first clear window to this mysterious outer world.
Capt. Holmes dives into the atmosphere from the vantage point of the outer space in this chapter, quoting astronauts who were awed to see the beauty of their home from the galactic neighbourhood.
Chapter 2: The Majestic Roof of Air
Of all the strange and wonderful materials which shape our world, none is more miraculous than the chemical cloak of the atmosphere.
Capt. Holmes goes on to explain how the Earth formed, how the nascent atmosphere took shape and gave our planet its first breath of life. He describes the test-tube earth experiment carried out by Dr Harold Urey to demonstrate the formation of the atmosphere in a really small scale.
Definite amounts of three amino acids were found, proving that these complex substances which exist in living tissue could have been created in the earth's original atmosphere by chemical reaction...Had it been possible to provide in the test tube all the probabilities of the vast ocean of air, and had it been practicable to maintain it for an indefinitely long period, we might have seen a replica of the first life-molecule come creeping up the evolutionary stairs.
Psst! This chapter also explains the layers of the atmosphere (we're so often asked this question in class) in a very cool way with an easily-comprehendible diagram.
Chapter 3: The Atomic Furnace
The ocean of atmosphere which surrounds us has provided a canopy over the earth for untold ages. It would appear logical that this sea of air would long ago have stabilised into a soft, still envelope so that now there would be no thunderstorms, no sudden gales, no lashing rain. The reason why this is not so are simple, although they puzzled man for many centuries. It is only lately that we have become aware that our atmosphere is like soup steaming in a gigantic kettle, churned and boiled by the radiant heat from our sun.
Here the vagaries of and created by the seemingly constantly hot-tempered sun are described with multiple diagrams
There are many possibilities which may bring an end to life on this globe: A new chemical in the gaseous envelope of the atmosphere; a single mutation in a presently unremarkable microbe; a sudden shift in the delicately balances gravitational field - any of these might sweep the living world away. But thereafter, new life would grow as the sun moved northward for the next spring. Only when the cinder grows cold, only when morning comes with no warmth and no light, will the world be truly dead. And on that blank and patternless day when the sun dies, then only we can say with certainty that the zero cold of timeless death will settle on the face of this earth.
Chapter 4: Islands in the Sky
The worldwide weather observations of today have established the fact that the air over us is divided into huge air masses - continents of air drifting with the winds of earth. These air masses have vastly differing characteristics and, as they drift over our part of the world, they vary our weather and cover us with alternate umbrellas of rain, snow, or sunshine.
Dry and cold winter air masses are formed at the polar regions while the equator is the spawning ground of the warm, wet and cloud-laden tropical air masses.
Just as the nations of the world are separated by boundaries, air masses are kept apart by barriers of their own making called fronts....The aviator will make every effort to avoid such fronts, since they are areas of great atmospheric turbulence and the source of most bad weather.
Capt. Holmes talks about fog and its types too here (very important question in FOR 222 - Forest Energy Resources)!
Chapter 5: Battle Lines in the Sky
The strife and turmoil of earthly inhabitants are mirrored in the sky where the shifting air masses live with each other no more peacefully than do the man-made nations below them. In fact, a vast, worldwide meteorological war is continuously in progress as the air masses invade the territories of other air masses. These sky battles are waged along the common boundaries called fronts. The fronts mark the interlocking of two radically differing atmospheric societies and they are responsible for most of the world's stormy weather.
The way parallels are drawn is stunning and makes you smile while reading (people looking at you might think you're reading a rom-com, not sci-comm) For instance: As with man-made politics, all border clashes do not provoke shooting wars, and many fronts pass over us without so much as a drop of rain or a cloud to obscure the sun. Such boundary zones are called weak fronts by weathermen and are caused by the meeting of air masses whose temperature and moisture content are similar. When the air masses differ radically in their temperature and moisture, the resulting front is said to be strong and the frontal passage is accompanied by violent rain, sharp wind shifts, and rapid temperature changes.
This is one of my favourite chapters in this book. There's so much more I want to include here but that would obviously defeat the purpose. There are clear photographs and diagrams of cloudy skies and the types of clouds (pun intended) and frontal precipitation (SWE 312). I have drawn some of these diagrams in my notebook for keepsake!
Chapter 6:The Imperfect Balance
...We are constantly flayed by the fierce rays of the sun and other cosmic bodies. It is only because of the hair-thin balance existing in the atmosphere that we are saved from being vapourised by this tremendous bombardment which bears down upon us with a continuous force equal to 250,000,000,000 horsepower. Life is permitted to exist only by the swirling atmosphere which dissipates and apportions this radiated energy. The great cold-front storms are one medium through which the circulating atmosphere reduces the enormous quantities of trapped solar heat. As a result of these processes, the heat released to the earth's surface is a mere fraction of the total radiation which comes our way.
Capt. Holmes elaborates that this state of neutrality is very precarious and when it upsets a little, the titanic forces around us stop being inconspicuous. He claims that the smallest hurricane is stronger than thousands of hydrogen bombs.
You might wonder if pollution has anything to do with weather. Capt. Holmes answers that too: The titanic forces of the atmosphere produce other, quieter phenomena which also bedevil us, and in some cases their formation is assisted by man himself...During recent ears, a very curious and steady increase has taken place in the incidence of fog over the world's industrial areas...This fog was different from the pure mists which develop naturally when moisture-laden air is cooled. It was often yellow and contained toxic gases which made people sick and even killed them. Scientists called this new killer smog.
As you can see, this is a very interesting chapter and apart from what I have mentioned, it also contains information on the world's temperature extremes and the Beaufort Wind Scale.
Chapter 7: The Twisting Winds
You'll find all the information you need about tornadoes here. Capt. Holmes generously and rightly includes a gripping eyewitness account of a tornado written by Capt. Roy of the US Army.
The damage inflicted by a tornado exhibits much of the freakish tendency of other violent weather phenomena. There have been cases where houses have been demolished by storms and the furniture carried away, only to be found later without a scratch. Straws have been driven deep into boards. Strong buildings have been destroyed while flimsy structures next to them came through the storm undamaged. In one instance, a herd of cattle was picked up by a tornado and lifted high in the air until the clouds appeared like great birds. Chickens are sometimes stripped of their feathers but otherwise unharmed.
Now, before I move on to the next chapter, we need to know a bit about Captain David Holmes himself.
David Charlson Holmes was born in 1919 in Washington. He graduated from the United States Naval Academy in 1942 and careered in the U.S.N. as an aviator and weapons expert (you'll see more of this as the rest of the book unfolds). He married Virginia (Squidge) Holmes in 1944. During the Second World War, he served on minesweepers (aircraft/ship equipped for detecting and destroying explosive mines) in the Pacific. He became a naval aviator after the war and an expert on guided missile systems for the Bureau of Aerospace from 1954-57. Next he managed the space-tracking network for the Advanced Research Projects Agency from 1958-62.He worked for the NATO in Norway for the next two years retired as Captain and director of Naval Weapons Engineering Support Activity in 1972. He continued working in GPS facilities and broadcasting networks after his retirement and died in 2004 at the age of 85.
I feel that it is very interesting to describe and understand things from the perspective of war. I do not mean we need to fight more bloody wars. But the ones we have already fought cannot be ignored as bygones. Wars bring about critical and maddening situations like the ones that Capt. Holmes chronicles. Wars give us nuclear weapons. But they also gave us penicillin antibiotic and the radar for weather.
So if you happen to be reading WEATHER Made Clear and start wondering why there are so many mentions of bombs and fighter aircrafts and missiles and random army generals barking at their soldiers, I hope this gives you context enough to understand.
I would say this is one of the things that distinguishes this weather book from other weather books. When we don't understand the science as it is, we need to give it some context. Capt. Holmes, having spent much of his life in the elements of the air and the sea, from different standpoints and situations, through the use of a variety of instruments, helps us exactly with that.
Chapter 8: The Hurricane
Nope, I ain't giving away anything here. This chapter is an absolute action movie with a bunch of valiant heroes.
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| This picture never fails to fill me with awe. |
Chapter 9: Twenty-Five Thousand Prophets
At this very instant and during every hour of the year, weather observations are being taken by the tireless weather crew. The temperature, pressure, humidity and winds are noted, coded, transmitted and analysed until the mighty atmosphere yields its secrets far more completely than it would to any space observer. This spiderweb of weather stations constitutes the modern weather machine and is the basis for weather prediction.
Here you'll find all about weather vs climate, meteorology vs climatology, forecast vs prediction and instrumental vs non-instrumental observations. This is another of my favourite chapters because it tells us how the barometer came into being, we finally acknowledge the family members of scientists, here Pascal's brother-in-law.
One inspiring line I found here is: All professions owe their origin to an amateur - for who can be a professional in a field not yet created?
Chapter 10: The Robot Forecaster
Captain Howard T. Orville was formerly the top United States Navy weatherman and chairman of President Eisenhower's Rain-Making Study Committee. Speaking before the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, he said that the tremendous property losses, the many highway deaths, and the suffering caused to millions of persons during winter months by ice and sleet storms could be greatly reduced through electronic weather prediction. He also stated that radar storm-detection units, coordinated with other key equipment placed at about 35 points around the country, could predict to the minute the arrival of a storm, its intensity and its duration.
The radar diagrams and the explanations are a treat.
Chapter 11: The Weather Moons
By now you must have realised that Capt. Holmes' usage of language is inspiringly creative. So the "weather moons" here are nothing but satellites, they're everything to weather prediction now.
On some not-so-distant evening we are certain to turn on our television sets and something far different from the usual weatherman with his weather charts and pointer will flash to life on the screen before us. We will see a faithful reproduction of the world and local weather as viewed by the cold and distant eye of a Nimbus weather satellite keeping eternal watch from outer space. Pictures will be available to all men everywhere, to the farmer in the Ural Mountains and to the ship captain on the Indian Ocean. All of us will have become our own weathermen, and hopefully, we will all be drawn closer together by the international spirit of cooperation which is a keystone of the weather satellite project.
Although real-time (or at least nearly real-time) satellite images are available to anyone with an internet connection, it remains to be answered whether all of us are competent enough to read one. P.S.: If anyone reading this blog is, please let me know, I really want to learn this supercool skill!
Chapter 12:The Invisible Army
Again, this is quite the war history movie (actually two: the real storms and the brainstorms that happened during Napoleon's battles and WWII's Normandy Invasion) that stays with you long after you finish watching it, so no spoilers here.
But I was having some doubts after reading this chapter, which I posed to my dad, a Lieutenant Colonel (Retd.) from the Indian Army. With just two keywords, "Eisenhower" and "weather", Appa was able to fish out from his memory what I was referring to. He echoed in Capt. Holmes words that weather and terrain are as important considerations in the battlefield as the enemy. Appa also gave me an example in the Indian context: when India was facing a mass influx of refugees from East Pakistan and Prime Minister Indra Gandhi had had enough of the atrocities committed by the Khan Army, she called in Field Marshal Sam Manekshaw and asked him for an immediate war. To this, the Field Marshal replied that she as the PM could tell him to carry out the war, but when exactly the war is declared is completely his decision as the soldier. This happened in July, when the rivers Brahmaputra and Ganga are in full spate. With careful planning, the war was successfully started and finished in December of the same year 1971, thanks to the fact that the invisible soldiers of the weather were factored into the war by the legendary Sam Bahadur.
Add to this, the events leading up to the Hiroshima and Nagasaki incidents. They were well-planned attacks that did not fail to include the weather variable in the war, chilling in fact.
Chapter 13: The Electric Blanket
We also have to come to realise that the incredible atmosphere is more than a sea of gases, more than a pattern of wind and storm. In every layer of our atmospheric blanket, electrical currents weave their intricate tapestry so that the envelope of air has become a gigantic electric field and a storehouse of power far beyond the total capacity of all the world's dams.
The analogies get even more creative:
To understand the relationship between atmosphere and electricity, it is helpful to visualise the earth and its surrounding gases as a gigantic dynamo of vast circumference and intricate design. The upper atmosphere can be regarded as the rotor or the whirling envelope, while the earth provides the magnetic field. As in our conventional generator, it is the interaction of the one upon the other which causes the electrical flow.
Chapter 14: Aerial Treasure House
Since we breathe 11,000 litres of air from the atmosphere each day, we might as well learn how that works. And Capt. Holmes narrates the processes of photosynthesis, respiration and thermoregulation along with the biogeochemical cycles beautifully, without mentioning these technical terms way too often like most textbooks usually do. You'll also be surprised to see why certain diseases are more common in some regions of the world!
I couldn't pick out anything from this chapter without feeling bad about leaving out something else. It is really a treasure like the name says!
Chapter 15: The Garden Planet
Langmuir, de Broglie; these names might seem familiar. Here you will see what these people contributed to the study of the atmosphere. Calling the Earth the "garden planet", Capt. Holmes claims: The 17,000,000,000,000 tons of water in the air offer a bountiful harvest if we can successfully reap it. But the atmosphere contains even greater riches. More than 1,000,000,000,000,000 kilowatt hours of energy beat unceasingly upon the earth's surface each day, radiated by the sun. This daily flow of energy is comparable to all the known reserves of coal, oil, falling water, natural gas, thorium and uranium on the earth.
From solar panels to artificially-induced rainfall, vast new ages full of promise lie before our race. And we will climb to meet them, even though the stairs are dark and we have no light to guide us, except that of our own courageous, questioning spirit.
So ends the book.
Now if you see, Capt. Holmes mentions at the end of nearly every chapter, how mankind will surely be able to conquer his environment, its elements and its energy and not have to depend on them in the near future. We do have an intrinsic urge to gain control of the things around us, but I didn't like these statements very much. So I chose not to mention them here.
The main and only "could-have-been" here is the units. Us Indian readers have to get used to lengths in foot and mile and temperature in degrees Fahrenheit mentioned in nearly every chapter. But this is not at all a serious issue: you can always whip out your calculator and use the conversion functions!
I really wish every subject had a book like this. Some textbooks really drain the energy out of the reader and books like these end up as saviours. They make you rethink the subject that you decided you hated and give you a more fulfilling perspective on what you already know, it gets better each time you re-read the book too! So, do go grab this book and give it a read!
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| Did I mention the captions are so cool! |
Thank you for reading all the way here! You might wonder why I have picked out whole chunks from the book and given them here verbatim. It is because this book is a science-communication book and obviously I'll have to mention some of the science too in my review. I tried to do so but I realised that there's no way I could do so better than Capt. Holmes! Like Anne from Anne of the Green Gables says: It simply cannot be improved by imagination!
