The Weather Machine: A Journey Inside the Forecast

For readers of The Secret Life of Trees and Tom Vanderbilt’s Traffic, a positive forecast about weather and those who report on it

The Weather Machine chronicles Andrew Blum’s exploration of the world of weather and the people who watch it. Drawing on the immersive tradition of John McPhee, the first-person explanatory science reporting of Mary Roach and Elizabeth Kolbert, the intellectual explorations of James Gleick and Jim Holt, and the unique travelogue of Blum’s own first book, Tubes, Blum takes readers on a journey deep into the weather report. He visits some of the world’s most far-off weather stations and watches the newest satellites blast off. He explores the dogged efforts of computational forecasters to create a living supercomputer model of the atmosphere by dialing in tens of thousands of constantly shifting variables. And he dives inside the weather app on your phone to see how the cloud in the sky becomes the cloud on your screen.