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Weather Wise
A practical and accessible guide to weather phenomena for the outdoors enthusiast, this book explains how forthcoming weather will develop as well as how to predict what is coming and assess how severe it will be. With practical tips, hints and fact panels, it will be useful to anyone pursuing an outdoor activity.
160 pages, Paperback
First published April 15, 2008
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
February 15, 2021
There were three things I didn’t like about this book; one due to the author, one due to my reading device, and one due to both the author and device. Alan Watts resides in England so a lot of examples focus on the local weather there. Not everything could be translated to Seattle making some of the localized weather descriptions useless to me.
My Kindle created a problem that was mostly manageable. Graphs in the book needed careful interpretation to distinguish the colored lines. Luckily, Alan usually included enough textual description so I could identify and separate the colors – even on my black and white display.
Lastly, and I think this would be a problem with both a book and Kindle, Alan references the same picture in multiple locations throughout the book so you need to jump forward or backward to review the picture. He uses the picture to support the discussion. He does use hyperlinks so getting there is fast. Getting back, not so. to the picture but no way to return to your position in the book without keeping track of the page number. Maybe this is a failing of how I use the Kindle but I found I referenced the pictures less and less as I got further into the book. Therefore, I got less out of it and examples presented.
No doubt the author knows weather. The book is packed with examples and information but it also seemed a bit haphazard in writing. For example, a few paragraphs into the chapter on Winds Alan shifts to a discussion on temperature. Yet there is a chapter dedicated to temperature. Was that really necessary? You could not use the book as a weather reference as you would struggle to find the relevant text without skimming most pages.
The book just didn't mesh with what I needed. The chapters give the appearance of structure but each individual chapter feels more like a conglomeration of facts. That’s a reference book but one without an index.
My Kindle created a problem that was mostly manageable. Graphs in the book needed careful interpretation to distinguish the colored lines. Luckily, Alan usually included enough textual description so I could identify and separate the colors – even on my black and white display.
Lastly, and I think this would be a problem with both a book and Kindle, Alan references the same picture in multiple locations throughout the book so you need to jump forward or backward to review the picture. He uses the picture to support the discussion. He does use hyperlinks so getting there is fast. Getting back, not so. to the picture but no way to return to your position in the book without keeping track of the page number. Maybe this is a failing of how I use the Kindle but I found I referenced the pictures less and less as I got further into the book. Therefore, I got less out of it and examples presented.
No doubt the author knows weather. The book is packed with examples and information but it also seemed a bit haphazard in writing. For example, a few paragraphs into the chapter on Winds Alan shifts to a discussion on temperature. Yet there is a chapter dedicated to temperature. Was that really necessary? You could not use the book as a weather reference as you would struggle to find the relevant text without skimming most pages.
The book just didn't mesh with what I needed. The chapters give the appearance of structure but each individual chapter feels more like a conglomeration of facts. That’s a reference book but one without an index.
November 13, 2010
Very comprehensive.
May 22, 2011
This is an excellent introduction to weather. It's mostly specific to Great Britain, but it also provides general advice to cover most of the northern hemisphere.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews