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

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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 ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Pagans (SF) - James Alistair Henry *****

There's a fascinating sub-genre of science fiction known as alternate history. The idea is that at some point in the past, history diverged from reality, resulting in a different present. Perhaps the most acclaimed of these books is Kingsley Amis's The Alteration , set in a modern England where there had not been a reformation - but James Alistair Henry arguably does even better by giving us a present where Britain is a third world country, still divided between Celts in the west and Saxons in the East. Neither the Normans nor Christianity have any significant impact. In itself this is a clever idea, but what makes it absolutely excellent is mixing in a police procedural murder mystery, where the investigation is being undertaken by a Celtic DI, Drustan, who has to work in London alongside Aedith, a Saxon reeve of equivalent rank, who also happens to be daughter of the Earl of Mercia. While you could argue about a few historical aspects, it's effectively done and has a plot...
Post a Comment
Read more

Amazing Worlds of Science Fiction and Science Fact: Keith Cooper ****

There's something appealing (for a reader like me) about a book that brings together science fiction and science fact. I had assumed that the 'Amazing Worlds' part of the title suggested a general overview of the interaction between the two, but Keith Cooper is being literal. This is an examination of exoplanets (planets that orbit a different star to the Sun) as pictured in science fiction and in our best current science, bearing in mind this is a field that is still in the early phases of development. It becomes obvious early on that Cooper, who is a science journalist in his day job, knows his stuff on the fiction side as well as the current science. Of course he brings in the well-known TV and movie tropes (we get a huge amount on Star Trek ), not to mention the likes of Dune, but his coverage of written science fiction goes into much wider picture. He also has consulted some well-known contemporary SF writers such as Alastair Reynolds and Paul McAuley, not just scient...
Post a Comment
Read more