Skip to main content

Jet Stream - Tim Woolings ****

The importance of the jet stream - a high speed flow of air that usually carries the warm air that makes the UK warmer than it should be for its position on the Earth - is rarely fully appreciated. Recently, though, we have had a number of extreme weather events that were put down to shifts in the jet stream, emphasising its significant impact on everyday life.

Tim Woolings starts his approachable exploration of the jet stream on a beach in Barbados (all in the interest of science, of course) and takes the reader through a surprising amount of information in a relatively slim 200 pages plus notes. For the first few pages we're introduced to some of the basics of weather forecasting at this Barbados location, but then we segue from surf and sun to the winds, and up to around 10 kilometres, where aircraft tend to cruise: here we meet the jet stream, which is beginning its journey in this region.

The reader is rewarded with plenty of juicy little facts, such as the revelation that the Japanese sent balloon bombs into the jet stream during the Second World War in the hope that they would be carried to America. As it happens, they miscalculated the flow rate (it's particularly fast over Japan) and only 3 per cent reached the US, though one did hit a Sunday school picnic in Oregon, causing the only mainland US deaths during the war. Also Woolings gives us a thorough exploration of the technicalities of wind and specifically the jet stream, from Hadley cells to equatorial super-rotation. We even get a quick visit to the jet streams of Jupiter and a 'future' chapter than mostly considers the potential impact of climate change on the jet stream. There's a considerable amount of detail, but Woolings doesn't resort to mathematics and keeps the whole thing approachable.

The narrative flow is linked using two conceits - an imagined journey of a weather balloon named Grantley and short biographical snippets at the end of each chapter, about a mysterious Joseph - I suspect the snippets were supposed to give a degree of page-turning suspense, but I just found them irritating. The problem is, I think that Joseph isn't revealed to be Lagrange until the final chapter, and finding out little bits about an unknown individual's life isn't at all inspiring. I wasn't totally sure about the use of Mary Poppins as way of introducing the rarity of an east wind in London either - the vehicle seemed a little forced. I'm all in favour of narrative in a science book (and, if anything, there could have been more real life storytelling), but I'd rather it was limited to non-fiction characters. Although it is mentioned, I would have liked rather more about chaos and the chaotic nature of weather systems too.

All in all, though, a good and surprisingly enjoyable trip around a weather phenomenon.


Hardback   
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Target Earth – Govert Schilling *****

I was biased in favour of this great little book even before I started to read it, simply because it’s so short. I’m sure that a lot of people who buy popular science books just want an overview and taster of a subject that’s brand new to them – and that’s likely to work best if the author keeps it short and to the point. Of course, you may want to dig deeper in areas that really interest you, but that’s what Google is for. That basic principle aside, I’m still in awe at how much substance Govert Schilling has managed to cram into this tiny book. It’s essentially about all the things (natural things, I mean, not UFOs or space junk) that can end up on Earth after coming down from outer space. That ranges from the microscopically small particles of cosmic dust that accumulate in our gutters, all the way up to the ten kilometre wide asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs. Between these extremes are two topics that we’ve reviewed entire books about recently: meteorites ( The Meteorite Hunt...

The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire - Henry Gee ****

In his last book, Henry Gee impressed with his A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth - this time he zooms in on one very specific aspect of life on Earth - humans - and gives us not just a history, but a prediction of the future - our extinction. The book starts with an entertaining prologue, to an extent bemoaning our obsession with dinosaurs, a story that leads, inexorably towards extinction. This is a fate, Gee points out, that will occur for every species, including our own. We then cover three potential stages of the rise and fall of humanity (the book's title is purposely modelled on Gibbon) - Rise, Fall and Escape. Gee's speciality is palaeontology and in the first section he takes us back to explore as much as we can know from the extremely patchy fossil record of the origins of the human family, the genus Homo and the eventual dominance of Homo sapiens , pushing out any remaining members of other closely related species. As we move onto the Fall section, Gee gives ...

The New Lunar Society - David Mindell *****

David Mindell's take on learning lessons for the present from the eighteenth century Lunar Society could easily have been a dull academic tome, but instead it was a delight to read. Mindell splits the book into a series of short essay-like chapters which includes details of the characters involved in and impact of the Lunar Society, which effectively kick-started the Industrial Revolution, interwoven with an analysis of the decline of industry in modern twentieth and twenty-first century America, plus the potential for taking a Lunar Society approach to revitalise industry for the future. We see how a group of men (they were all men back then) based in the English Midlands (though with a strong Scottish contingent) brought together science, engineering and artisan skills in a way that made the Industrial Revolution and its (eventual) impact on improving the lot of the masses possible. Interlaced with this, Mindell shows us how 'industrial' has become something of a dirty wo...