Weather Science

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 these quotidian interactions is one of the most expansive machines human beings have ever constructed - a triumph of science, technology, and global cooperation. But what is this "weather machine" and who created it?

In Firmament, atmospheric scientist and science communicator Simon Clark offers a rare and accessible tour of the ins and outs of the atmosphere and how we know what we know about it. From the workings of its different layers to why carbon dioxide is special, from pioneers like Pascal to the unsung heroes working in the field to help us understand climate change, Firmament introduces us to an oft-overlooked area of science and not only lays the ground work for us to better understand the debates surrounding the climate today.

A young woman possessed by a ghost has slain the Fisher King of the West, Scott Crane. Now, temporarily freed from that malevolent spirit, she seeks to restore the King to life....

Learn what it's like to live in a very cold place. In this book, you'll visit cities with very cold weather and learn why the temperatures dip so low.

Some places are so high that they touch the clouds. Listen to this book to find out more about places with very high elevations.

Many places on Earth are lower than the sea! Listen to this book to find out more about places that are below sea level.

January 12, 1888, began as an unseasonably warm morning across Nebraska, the Dakotas, and Minnesota, the weather so mild that children walked to school without coats and gloves. But that afternoon, without warning, the atmosphere suddenly, violently changed. One moment the air was calm; the next the sky exploded in a raging chaos of horizontal snow and hurricane-force winds. Temperatures plunged as an unprecedented cold front ripped through the center of the continent.

On October 1, 2015, the SS El Faro, a cargo ship tall as a hundred-story building that made a regular run between Jacksonville, Florida, and Puerto Rico, delivering everything from razor blades to new Chevrolet cars, disappeared in Hurricane Joaquin, a category 4 storm. The ship, her hundreds of shipping containers, and her entire crew sank to the bottom of the ocean, three miles down. The sinking was the greatest seagoing US merchant marine shipping disaster since World War II.

This audiobook describes what a heat wave is, and how it affects both city life and country life.

We live at the bottom of an ocean of air - 5,200 million million tons, to be exact. It sounds like a lot, but Earth’s atmosphere is smeared onto its surface in an alarmingly thin layer - 99 percent contained within 18 miles. Yet, within this fragile margin lies a magnificent realm - at once gorgeous, terrifying, capricious, and elusive. With his keen eye for identifying and uniting seemingly unrelated events, Chris Dewdney reveals to us the invisible rivers in the sky that affect how our weather works and the structure of clouds and storms and seasons, the rollercoaster of climate.

From the solar system to spinning tops, hurricanes to hula hoops, power plants to pendulums, one mysterious force shapes almost every aspect of our lives: spin. Despite its ubiquity, rotational force continues to baffle and surprise, and few people realize how it makes our planet habitable or how it has been tamed by engineers to make our lives more comfortable. Charting the development of engineering and technology from the earliest prehistoric drills to the gas turbine, Roland Ennos presents a riveting account of human ingenuity and the seemingly infinite ways spin affects our daily lives.

While investigating rain, learn about the water cycle and problems with rain, including droughts and floods.

Describes the process of how hurricanes can form. Also includes explanations of tropical storms and a storm surge.

What happens when winter brings blizzards? Help kids understand the characteristics of this chilling weather phenomenon, including whiteouts, strong winds, snowdrifts, and wind chills.

Learn about snow and snow crystals. How water turns into snow is the focus of this book, with a discussion of blizzards and other extreme conditions.

This audiobook describes the process of how thunderstorms can form. It also includes explanations of downdrafts, storm cells, supercells, electric energy, thunder, lightning, squall lines, hail, and wind bursts.

Sunrises, sunsets, rainbows—all these things come from the sun. Sunshine also gives us light, warmth, food, and creates all of our weather.

Find out about the different types of winds, including global winds, trade winds, local winds, and breezes. Learn about extreme wind weather like hurricanes and tornadoes.

In the winter of 1952, New England was battered by the most brutal nor’easter in years. As the weather wreaked havoc on land, the freezing Atlantic became a wind-whipped zone of peril, setting the stage for one of the most heroic rescue stories ever lived. On February 18, while the storm raged, two oil tankers, the Pendleton and the Fort Mercer, were in the same horrifying predicament. Built with “dirty steel,” and not prepared to withstand such ferocious seas, both tankers split in two, leaving the dozens of men on board utterly at the Atlantic’s mercy.

Bill Ayers was born into privilege and is today a highly respected educator and community activist. In the late 1960s he was a founder of the militant activist group the Weather Underground. Living on the run, stealing explosives, and hiding from the law, Ayers was involved in the defining moments of his generation: the Days of Rage, SDS, the Black Panthers - and the explosion that killed his beloved comrade, Diana Oughton.