Review: The Weather Machine

The Weather Machine is a history of the weather forecasting system. It discusses a history of weather forecasting, the network of weather stations that collect the data, the birth of the satellite weather observation stations, and the rise of modern super-computers that do the forecasts that have become fairly reliable in the short term (1-3 days).

It's a short read, and I love short reads that provide deep insight, but unfortunately in this case the coverage is extremely shallow. There's no coverage of how the forecasting computation actually works. There's no coverage of how the new systems of climate attribution work. There's nothing about how the old "front" system of forecasting works.

In other words, this is a "science book" written by English majors for English majors who don't actually know anything about anything. The author probably got excited about this book in the morning, whipped up a short summary by afternoon, and got bored 2 weeks into writing the book and couldn't be bothered to actually turn it into a book with real substance. I ended the book disappointed and was glad I didn't pay money for it.