The Weather Machine: A Journey Inside the Forecast
Ratings4
Average rating4.3
15
Ratings4
Average rating4.3
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.
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Weather Machine : Political Machine :: forge : weave. Hey, first time I've ever used an analogy in that particular format in the title of a review. The answer, of course, is that all four are ways of making different things. Forging is the process of creating metal objects, weaving is the process of creating cloth objects. Similarly, a "political machine" is the process of creating some political outcome, and according to Blum in this text, a "Weather Machine" is the process of creating a... weather forecast.
Blum begins with a history of some of the earliest attempts at forecasting the weather for a given location, moving from the realm of religion and superstition to the realm of science - religion and superstition by another name, but sounding better to the "modern" ear. The history largely culminates with a discussion of the early 20th century concept of the "Weather Machine", a giant warehouse full of human computers using slide rules to run calculations based on observations placed into a mathematical model in order to predict the weather.
An admiral goal well ahead of its time... but once computers (and particularly supercomputers) became a thing... perhaps an ideal no longer ahead of ours. It is here, in the era of computing, that Blum spends the rest of the text, showing how the first and earliest computer models found success all the way up to showing how certain modern models and teams work to forecast ever further out ever more rapidly... and how all of this now largely happens inside the computer itself, rather than in the suppositions of "trained meteorologists".
In other words, this is a book not about weather itself, but about the process and, yes, *business*, of creating a weather *forecast* and the various issues and histories tha come to bear in this process.
Ultimately a very illuminating work about the business side of forecasting, Blum could have perhaps spent more time showing how say hurricane and tornado forecasts are formed and how much they have progressed in the last few decades, rather than forecasting more generally - but he also ultimately stayed more true to his general premise in staying more general, showing how forecasting *as a whole* has gotten so much more detailed without diving too deep into any particular area of forecasting itself.
Ultimately a rather fascinating look at a topic few people truly understand.
Very much recommended.
Originally posted at bookanon.com.
