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THE ROUGH GUIDE TO WEATHER Robert Henson, 2002, 416 pp., $17.95, paperbound, Rough Guides, ISBN 1-85828-827-4
The title Rough Guide was vaguely familiar to me from seeing others in the series, and I was curious about how a book on weather would fit. The Rough Guide series started as travel books from the United Kingdom in the niche between "heavyweight cultural guides" and low-budget travel advice. The series includes travel, language, music, and a variety of reference books (see www.roughguides.com). Given this background, how would the book fit this niche in the publishing world?
The themes given in the introduction can be paraphrased as
* handling the flood of data on the web;
* making a specific forecast for an event;
* recognizing signs of trouble in the backcountry;
* typical and extreme weather at a distant destination;
* how do forecasters decide on special weather events?
I admit to first opening the book to the guide portion in the last half. I was very impressed with the material for travelers. Gone is a meaningless summary such as, "Springfield has an average temperature of 50 degrees, and more than 250 sunny days a year." Instead, there is an excellent set of graphics for representative locations. Each city's description has a half-page box with monthly data showing record and average high and low temperatures, average rainfall and number of wet days, hours of sunshine, days with thunder and snow, 5:00 P.M. humidity, sunrise and sunset times, as well as a four-line summary. Accompanying text describes the climate for every country or group of contiguous countries in the world.
This guide is a must for international travelers for understanding the range of expected weather. There are incisive summaries that take into account the changed political divisions of the last two decades. This is truly a formidable and remarkable effort. Some climates are described that have not been readily accessible in English in recent years. Some of the climates described have combinations of amazingly complex rainfall...