Dimensions
163 x 237 x 28mm
Renowned climatologist and storm consultant takes us through the destructive events of Hurricane Sandy-actual and political-to draw a roadmap for the future of our climate and hurricane defense. Storm Surge will be a book that explains what is happening in our planet's atmosphere through the prism of one extraordinary event: Hurricane Sandy. As an atmospheric scientist and tenured professor at Columbia University, Adam Sobel's life's work has been to study the climate and weather of the earth. He has traveled to remote corners of the tropics to observe cumulus clouds and monsoon rains. Nearly every day he reads global weather maps and satellite cloud images and analyzes atmospheric data on the computer screen. But he experienced the most important weather system of his career at home in New York City. Sandy raised questions: Was it just a freak event, or are we to blame? Was climate change responsible for the event and can we expect similar storms in the future? How can we prepare? Storm Surge will be a popular science book that will answer these questions, communicating both the scientific fascination and the human terror of this storm. It will describe how Hurricane Sandy was born from the Madden-Julian oscillation, a giant ripple in the global monsoon winds coming east from the Pacific, and then how a winter storm and a blocking high pressure system off Greenland combined to rejuvenate Sandy and make it take a once-in-700-year left turn into New Jersey. It will explain why, despite the prescient forecast, our meteorological vocabulary failed our forecasters and leaders as they warned us about Sandy. It will bring together the melting glaciers, the shifting jet streams, and the warming oceans to explain how our changing climate will bring more superstorms to New York and other cities. Told from a major authority on storms, and an engaging professor and writer, Storm Surge is sure to provoke new thinking about the future of our climate, and how we can prepare.
