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The Weather of Britain
Robin Stirling
FRGS FRMetS
The Weather of Britain
(ISBN 9781900357067)
was published in this extensively revised, expanded
and completely updated second edition in July 1997.
New foreword by Ian McCaskill.
318 pages 228 x 176 mm 44 black & white illustrations,
146 line illustrations including 100 maps, and 49 tables
£19.99
Comments from readers and reviewers
On the new, second edition
Ian McCaskill in his foreword to the new edition: '...the citizen needs no other volume to possess an authoritative account of every aspect of Britain's weather, past, present and future. I can think of no topic in meteorology which he has not covered happily and well.'
Journal of Meteorology: 'This book deserves to be a success, and I can unhesitatingly recommend it to all readers of this magazine.'
Michael Hanlon in the Independent: '...the bible of weather lore...'
New Scientist: 'Robin Stirling offers a huge banquet to feed the British obsession in his expanded second edition of The Weather of Britain. Full to bursting with tales of extremes -- storms, heat waves and tornadoes -- Stirling also does a great job of breaking down the unpredictable mechanics of climate into its constituent nuts
and bolts. Graphs, charts and dramatic photographs [are included].
Description
It is no accident that the weather is a perpetual topic of conversation in Britain. For its range of extreme conditions our climate is quite unusual. Winds of over 130 mph (1976), arctic conditions like those in early 1963 and snowstorms producing 6 feet of undrifted snow in 15 hours (1929), fogs in which you cannot see your own feet (1952), protracted droughts as in 1975-6 and 1995-7 and heatwaves with temperatures reaching 100°F (1868), hailstorms showering down ½ lb hailstones (1925), ice-storms so severe that birds fell to the ground in mid flight, weighed down by coats of ice (1940), and deluges releasing 11 inches of rain in 24 hours (1955) -- Robin Stirling tells us of these and many other equally remarkable phenomena, assessing their significance in relation to average conditions both locally and nationally, and putting all the facts into perspective.
<> A mine of information, The Weather of Britain has proved absorbing for all those with a general interest in the subject and valuable for people whose jobs and even lives depend on having a detailed and accurate knowledge of Britain's weather. It is now appearing in paperback for the first time in this second, extensively revised and completely updated edition.
Author
A professional geographer and teacher, Robin Stirling was well known for his meteorological researches, in which he was active throughout his life. He was a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and of the Royal Meteorological Society, and was also the author of Modern Suggestive Geographies, Part II, The World (Wheaton).
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