Weather Science

The story begins on a windswept beach in Barbados, from where we follow the ascent of a weather balloon that will travel along the jet stream all around the world. From this viewpoint we observe the effect of the jet in influencing human life around the hemisphere, and witness startling changes emerging. What is the jet stream and how well do we understand it? How does it affect our weather and is it changing? These are the main questions tackled in this book.

Despite taking her cat with her when she moved for university, Freya is lonely. Her need for friendship leads her to join a group on a night out. But can her new acquaintances be trusted? An out-of-season snowstorm descends on the city. The night streets are haunted by terrifying black barghests. There's a freak accident in the climbing gym. And not all of her new friends are what they seem. When a descendant of Apollo attacks the group with crows and arrows, Freya is horrified. But when it turns out he's on a vendetta to get rid of weres, Freya isn't sure what to think.

It’s the height of summer in Moreland, and Grace Griffin and her fellow warden Tom Eely are sweltering in the heat until they answer a strange call for help that comes through on the amazing Griffin map. After teleporting to Oakwell, they find the town paralysed by a freezing snowstorm, which is ruining the famous summer market that brings in visitors and trade. Using their mystery-solving skills and amazing inventions, can Grace and Tom find the cause for the weird weather and restore summer from the snow?

From a light breeze cooling a hot brow to a gale that blows apart buildings, no other natural phenomenon affects people as directly as wind. DeBlieu explores how wind has aided the rise and fall of empires, the discovery of continents, and the establishment of religions. Wind provides surprising, delightful insights into a force that constantly reshapes who we are and how we live. Suzanne Toren’s narration lends a voice of quiet, thoughtful authority to a subject you’ll never view the same again.

Climate change is with us, and we need to think about the next big disturbing idea - the potentially disastrous consequences of massive numbers of environmental refugees at large on the planet. In 2020, the United Nations projects that we will have 50 million environmental refugees mostly from Africa, Asia, and Latin America. How will people be relocated and settled? Is it possible to offer environmental refugees temporary or permanent asylum? Will these refugees have any collective rights in the new areas they inhabit?

Climate change is today's news, but it isn't a new phenomenon. Centuries-long cycles of heating and cooling are well documented for Europe and the North Atlantic. These variations in climate, including the Medieval Warm Period (MWP), AD 900 to 1300, and the early centuries of the Little Ice Age (LIA), AD 1300 to 1600, had a substantial impact on the cultural history of Europe.

While reporting just outside of Darfur, Stephan Faris discovered that climate change was at the root of that conflict, and he began to wonder what current and impending - and largely unanticipated - crises such changes have in store for the world. Forecast provides the answers. Global warming will spur the spread of many diseases. Italy has already experienced its first climate-change epidemic of a tropical disease, and malaria is gaining ground in Africa.

We all talk about them. We all plan our lives by them. We are all obsessed with the outlook ahead. The changing seasons have shaped all of our lives, but what happens when the weather changes beyond recognition? The author, Joe Shute, has spent years unpicking Britain’s long-standing love affair with the weather. He has pored over the literature, art and music our weather systems have inspired and trawled through centuries of established folklore to discover the curious customs and rituals we have created in response to the seasons.

In this definitive guide, climatologists Barry D. Keim and Robert A. Muller examine the big picture of Gulf hurricanes - from the 1800s to the present and from Key West, Florida, to Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula - providing an extraordinary compilation and interpretation of the entire region's hurricane and tropical storm history. Drawing from their own research and from National Hurricane Center records, Keim and Muller examine numerous individual Gulf storms.

Listen and relive the exciting tales from Highlights, now on audio! Learn how and why pinecones protect and release seeds and about how wind and water have shaped desert sandstone into giant rock formations, along with other stories about science and scientists.

Isaac's Storm meets The Age of Wonder in Lee Sandlin's Storm Kings, a riveting tale of the weather's most vicious monster - the super cell tornado - that recreates the origins of meteorology, and the quirky, pioneering, weather-obsessed scientists who helped change America.

For many, the past few years have been defined by climate disaster. Stories about once-in-a-lifetime hurricanes, floods, fires, droughts, and even snowstorms are now commonplace. But dramatic weather events are not new and Northeaster, Cathie Pelletier's breathtaking account of the 1952 snowstorm that blanketed New England, offers a valuable reminder about nature's capacity for destruction as well as insight into the human instinct for preservation.

For nearly a decade, Palley has been on the frontline of fire. He has witnessed homeowners on the worst day of their lives. He’s seen puddles of aluminum where cars were once parked. He’s watched as 150-foot walls of flame cascaded down mountainsides and crashed into the Pacific Ocean. And he’s captured, time and again, the tireless commitment of firefighters as they work to save lives and homes, in terrain where fire always seems to have the upper hand.

An exploration of humanity’s relationship with ice since the dawn of civilization, Of Ice and Men reminds us that only by understanding this unique substance can we save the ice on our planet—and perhaps ourselves.

Tim Flannery's international best seller The Weather Makers changed minds and hearts about global warming. We Are the Weather Makers is a concise and revised edition that allows listeners of all ages to learn the facts about climate change. In this passionate book Tim Flannery writes about cyclones and droughts, about coral reefs and polar bears, about wind energy and nuclear power. He reminds us that climate connects us all, from the Arctic to the Outback. And our climate is influenced by how we choose to live - how we use our fuels, our water and our land.

A night that starts out as the best night of David’s life goes terribly wrong. He and his fiancé, Julie, wander into Banger territory while trying to help a wounded man. David ends up shot in the head and his girlfriend, kidnapped. Fighting for his life, David is rushed to the hospital where a brilliant neurologist uses a daring new treatment to save him. He survives, but he doesn't remember a thing... not who he is or where he comes from, or that his girlfriend is in terrible danger.

Siroccos, Santa Anas, chinooks, monsoons...the wind has as many names as moods. Few other forces have so universally shaped the lands and waters of the earth, the plants and animals, the patterns of exploration, settlement, and civilization. Few other phenomena have exerted such a profound influence on the history and psyche of humankind. Wind touches all of us every day of our lives, yet remarkably little has been written about it except as a component of the weather.

Chris Mooney, author of The Republican War on Science and one of the leading young environmental journalists and bloggers working today, immerses listeners in the world of those who study hurricanes. What was once an arcane branch of meteorology (itself an arcane science) has become embroiled in one of the most politicized and hotly contested debates in American science: whether or not the recent hurricane disasters, culminating in Katrina, are connected to global warming.

Climate fiction without apocalypse, set in and around Washington, D.C. Newly minted engineering professor Jake Harper, dealing with issues of mild dyslexia and awkwardness with public speaking, wants to stave off climate weirding by re-engineering the North American electric grids. His pregnant partner Abbey London, sassy but irresistible, starts her practice as an infectious disease specialist, concerned with encroaching tropical diseases. Together they operate her parents' Dragonfly Inn just twenty minutes away in northern Virginia.

Disaster relief as we know it did not exist when the deadliest tornado in U.S. history gouged a path from southeast Missouri through southern Illinois and into southwestern Indiana. The tri-state tornado of 1925 hugged the ground for 219 miles, generated wind speeds in excess of 300 miles per hour, and killed 695 people.