Invisible in the Storm: The Role of Mathematics in Understanding Weather by Ian Roulstone (PDF)

Description

An accessible book that examines the mathematics of weather predictionInvisible in the Storm is the first book to recount the history, personalities, and ideas behind one of the greatest scientific successes of modern times—the use of mathematics in weather prediction. Although humans have tried to forecast weather for millennia, mathematical principles were used in meteorology only after the turn of the twentieth century. From the first proposal for using mathematics to predict weather, to the supercomputers that now process meteorological information gathered from satellites and weather stations, Ian Roulstone and John Norbury narrate the groundbreaking evolution of modern forecasting.The authors begin with Vilhelm Bjerknes, a Norwegian physicist and meteorologist who in 1904 came up with a method now known as numerical weather prediction. Although his proposed calculations could not be implemented without computers, his early attempts, along with those of Lewis Fry Richardson, marked a turning point in atmospheric science. Roulstone and Norbury describe the discovery of chaos theory’s butterfly effect, in which tiny variations in initial conditions produce large variations in the long-term behavior of a system—dashing the hopes of perfect predictability for weather patterns. They explore how weather forecasters today formulate their ideas through state-of-the-art mathematics, taking into account limitations to predictability. Millions of variables—known, unknown, and approximate—as well as billions of calculations, are involved in every forecast, producing informative and fascinating modern computer simulations of the Earth system.Accessible and timely, Invisible in the Storm explains the crucial role of mathematics in understanding the ever-changing weather.Some images inside the book are unavailable due to digital copyright restrictions.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐enjoyed this book. It is a systematic account of the development of weather forecasting. The writing style is engaging there is a nice balance of historical and biographical detail as well as explanation of the relevant concepts from Mathematics and Physics. It is deliberately limited on the technical aspects. I enjoyed the journey: from developing physical model of the various aspects of weather; the remarkable power of simpler models in large scale phenomena in )the pre-computer era) in motivating ongoing pursuit of the `holy grail’ of accurate prediction; the convergence of technologies to increase accuracy of measurement with increasing scope and level of detail of measurement and the increasing power of electronic computing unmasking the problem of chaos; and the need for more sophisticated mathematics to `tame the chaos’: to understand the constraints, to better characterize attractors, to develop horizons of prediction and to use statistical (probabilistic) methods such as ensemble forecasting to place bounds on the uncertainties.The book shows how complex and amazing the weather remains. The human endeavor to understand it has involved different personalities, different viewpoints, changing capabilities. The book describes the importance of non-linearities in explaining the complex and chaotic observed phenomena…it strikes me that although the book presents the a systematic and incremental increase in understanding, that the complex interactions of people, time and technology make progress non-linear. The birth of meteorology and its connections to the Mathemticsm Physics and Astronomy is fascinating. The book is another example of the unreasonable effectiveness of Mathematics in explaining the world, as well as the vision, persistence and hard work of Mathematicians, Physicists, and Metereologists.

⭐I had been looking for a book like this for years. I am interested in finance / hedge funds, and the big task for hedge funds is predicting the future, so I’m very interested in any other fields that also try to predict the future (meteorology, science fiction, military strategy, etc.). I bought some textbooks on meteorology but got bogged down in the formulas and the length of the books, so I hoped that there might exist a more readable overview of how it all worked. This book came to the rescue.I guess a key thing to know about it that isn’t obvious from the cover is that the bulk of the book is a history of how math came to be used in meteorology. It walks you step-by-step through each new innovation. It’s just brilliant, in my opinion. I haven’t yet finished reading it, though. I’m going through very slowly, underlining the main ideas it as I read so I can refer back to it later and get an overview of the flow of ideas in each chapter.This book would make a great gift for anyone with a serious interest in finance.

⭐I find the style of these two authors very difficult to follow. And it is irritating that this book (like so many other popular science books) has a misleading (sub)title. Most of the book is a mediocre historical essay written by two mathematicians about other mathematicians. Then there are a few boxes of optional reading (isn’t all reading optional?) that contain a few equations but in my view very far from what the subtitle promises.

⭐The narrative throughout the book recalls the development of NWP from the start. Along the way are separate boxed pages which record the formulae being used at that time which do not detract from the narrative but are there for mathematicians to ponder.An excellent read.

⭐Well, I’m not mathematically skilled, but I still greatly enjoyed this fascinating story of the evolution of weather forecasting and the challenges it has continued to present to mathematicians and to science in general.

⭐Che però non gioiranno degli approfondimenti poco curati (v. Tech Box 4.1 a pag. 133). Agli altri, meno esperti, vanno comunque molte notizie storiche sparse nel testo. Qui, secondo gli autori, due matematici, dietro alle equazioni che governano l’attuale previsione meteo c’è nascosto, e quindi è “invisible”, il ruolo determinante della matematica. Ma si sa, quando non scovano teoremi i matematici si rassegnano ai problemi più mondani dei fisici. E se dovesse andar male, dicono, non è colpa nostra, ma del caos. La meteorologia è materia difficile, anche perché è multidisciplinare, stretta fra l’ardua fluidodinamica e l’elusiva termodinamica, fra movimento ed equilibrio termico che armonizzano poco fra loro. Ad esempio, non è ancora chiaro perché certe zone di bassa pressione debbano improvvisamente rinforzarsi fino a precipitare in devastanti uragani – vedi “Floyd” in avvicinamento alla Florida nella splendida immagine da satellite della copertina del libro o “Dora” a pag. 110 – e invece le zone di alta pressione non possano innalzarsi altrettanto rapidamente. Come dire: il cattivo tempo coglie quasi sempre di sorpresa, il bel tempo invece si fa sempre annunciare. Non basterà, credo, la sola matematica a spiegare questa asimmetria.

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