Floods, Droughts, and Climate Change

by Michael Collier, Robert H. Webb

No one in America would deny that the weather has changed drastically in our lifetime. We read about El Niño and La Niña, but how many of us really understand the big picture beyond our own front windows or even the headlines on the Weather Channel? Hydrologists and climatologists have long been aware of the role of regional climate in predicting floods and understanding droughts. But with our growing sense of a variable climate, it is important to reassess these natural disasters not as isolated events but as related phenomena.

This book shows that floods and droughts don't happen by accident but are the products of patterns of wind, temperature, and precipitation that produce meteorologic extremes. It introduces the mechanics of global weather, puts these processes into the longer-term framework of climate, and then explores the evolution of climatic patterns through time to show that floods and droughts, once considered isolated "acts of God," are often related events driven by the same forces that shape the entire atmosphere.

Michael Collier and Robert Webb offer a fresh, insightful look at what we know about floods, droughts, and climate variability—and their impact on people—in an easy-to-read text, with dramatic photos, that assumes no previous understanding of climate processes. They emphasize natural, long-term mechanisms of climate change, explaining how floods and droughts relate to climate variability over years and decades. They also show the human side of some of the most destructive weather disasters in history.

As Collier and Webb ably demonstrate, "climate" may not be the smooth continuum of meteorologic possibilities we supposed but rather the sum of multiple processes operating both regionally and globally on different time scales. Amid the highly politicized discussion of our changing environment, Floods, Droughts, and Climate Change offers a straightforward scientific account of weather crises that can help students and general readers better understand the causes of climate variability and the consequences for their lives.

160 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2002

About the author

Michael Collier is an American photographer. His work is often aerial photography of landscapes. He was featured in a recent NPR show and photo montage narrated by Howard Berkes called Sky Vision.[1] Collier's photographs in the book The Mountains Know Arizona won the National Outdoor Book Award in 2004 for Design and Artistic Merit.

Collier used to have the job of rowing boats in the Grand Canyon. Collier currently practices medicine in Flagstaff, Arizona for his career. He also is a professor at the NAU School of Earth Sciences and Environmental Sustainability

Reviews

[Zjay · Rating 4 out of 5]

Technical, but thorough. Usable illustrations.

[John Kaufmann · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good book on climate change. This book finally presented ocean currents and the El Nino/La Nina cycle so that I understand it. Short book with a lot of depth.