Reviews for The Science of Sailing

The average rating for The Science of Sailing based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2019-04-22 00:00:00 Annie Herve I picked this book up a decade ago when I was working on a journal piece dealing with storm shelter access in tornado-vulnerable regions of the country. While I used it for my research, I never sat down and just read it from cover to cover with no need. May 3, a date personal to me and my history with weather, came around, and I picked the book up to read in its entirety and in the order presented. All in all, I enjoyed the ride. While there are some moments in the middle where the science on data gets a little dry, but the emotions and storytelling connected to the major weather events selected by the author more than make up for those dips. Some of the criticisms of the book seem to ignore the intended audience for the book - a non-academic reader with an interest in meteorology. This is not designed to be an academic text for use on a college campus, and those individuals will already have the high-level knowledge of how radar works and how it has developed. Keeping in mind his audience, while this book could have been much longer, and more issues discussed could have been told with greater detail, Smith strikes a good balance of providing the necessary facts while holding the reader's attention. The sprinkling of human touches throughout the science makes the book intelligent and a bit emotional (but full disclosure: I am emotional at all tornado stories!). Smith has a huge arsenal of weather events to describe, and he chooses carefully. Some tornadoes are those that affected him personally, but some events, particularly the hurricanes, are life-changing events in the history of storm prediction. In particular, his account of the numerous failings around Hurricane Katrina, committed by everyone except the meteorologists, is well done. Obviously, he cannot get into the many layers of problems before, during, and after Katrina, but his job is not to address all of those. He simply has a few chapters to discuss the science and remind the reader that the best science in the world can't overcome horrible bureaucracy. The book ends beautifully by demonstrating how far we've come with forecasting and the ability to save lives, the foundation of all forecasting work. Smith chooses the ferocious, although relatively not well-known (outside meteorology communities), Greensburg tornado to show how the advances in science have saved many lives. While the 1999 Bridge Creek-Moore tornado was perhaps even more of a celebration when comparing population to death toll, Smith makes good use of the facts around Greensburg to perfectly compare it to the earlier, much deadlier, yet otherwise very similar Udall tornado. Smith has a lot to say in this area, and he says it well. I'd love to have a chat with him about the gaps we have in shelter access now that we've come so far in warnings, especially post-Joplin and the 2013 Moore tragedy.

Review # 2 was written on 2018-12-08 00:00:00 Tero Vahlroos A description of the development of American severe weather warning systems focusing on tornados, but covering also the reception and integration of Fujita's downburst theories and including what reads as a fairly lengthy but not particularly informative aside on hurricane forecasting, relating specifically (and almost exclusively) to 1992's hurricane Andrew and the Katrina catastrophe of 2005. Smith's history seldom reaches farther back than 1948, but this is because the volume is also something of a professional memoir: the author as a storm spotter in 9th grade 1966 Kansas City, his career as a television meteorologist in Oklahoma City, St. Louis and Wichita, and eventually his founding of WeatherData Services, Inc. in 1981. (WeatherData Services is a provider of "weather-risk management consulting and state-of-the-art weather forecasting and services to utility, transportation, manufacturing, educational and governmental clients"* and is now a part of AccuWeather Inc., though Mr. Smith remains its CEO and regularly touts its services, record and software in this book.) Though expecting a broader history, two aspects of Mr. Smith's account stay with me. First is simply the record of discovery. It is a welcome but disconcerting experience to be reminded what, still beyond our ken, shares the planet with us. There are for instance, Smith informs us, huge djinn here, terrible creatures a dozen miles tall and a league wide, who, roaring with winds fiercer than a typhoon, suddenly appear and disappear across the land, often at night, indiscriminately destroying all they meet, only to, with no real notice, fold themselves up again into the air and vanish. What exactly are they? Our wise ones still try to understand, but only slowly and with much caution, as a djinni, even when encountered, is difficult to approach without suffering enormous violence: being fatally propelled through the air, having limbs ripped from one's body etc. It is easy at times to read Smith’s reports as records of the exploration of an unknown world. On the other hand, Mr. Smith’s incomplete and largely anecdotal description of the development of the severe weather warning systems in the U.S. (both private and public, though mostly of the public systems and, again, most coherently on tornadic weather) from the post WWII radars to the current dopplers, and of the institutional and technological challenges in constructing what wants to be a network of instantaneous observational and communications capability, is a very human tale. And though perhaps a report from a planet more familiar -- with its institutional and bureaucratic conflicts and inertias as well as its incremental technological advances and uneven deployments -- it is also a tale well worth being reminded of. "Warnings" unfortunately has no index, a disservice even in a work so slight. *from an American Meteorological Society description