27° Celsius = 81° Fahrenheit
25 miles = 40 kilometers
500–900° Celsius = 932–1,652° Fahrenheit
250 miles = 400 kilometers
400 miles = 650 kilometers
1,900° Celsius = 3,452° Fahrenheit
400 miles = 650 kilometers
1,800 miles = 2,900 kilometers
1,900 miles = 2,890 kilometers
4,000° Celsius = 7,230° Fahrenheit
3,200 miles = 5,150 kilometers
6,927° Celsius = 12,500° Fahrenheit
400° Celsius = 720° Fahrenheit
-19º Celsius = 0º Fahrenheit
14º Celsius = 57º Fahrenheit
435 miles = 700 kilometers
6 inches = 15 centimeters
35 cubic feet = 1,000 liters
15,600 feet = 4,600 meters
18,906 feet = 5,800 meters
435 miles = 700 kilometers
375–500 miles = 600–800 kilometers
1,800 miles = 2,900 kilometers
3–4 inches = 7–11 centimeters
1,900 miles = 3,000 kilometers
Selected Bibliography
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Alberti, Leon Battista. De Re Aedificatoria. Translated by Richard Owen. London, 1755.
Ambrose, Stephen E., and C.L. Sulzberger. American Heritage New History of World War II. New York: Viking, 1997.
Aristotle. Meterologica. Translated by H.D.P. Lee. London: Heinemann, 1952.
Barnett, Cynthia, Rain: A Natural and Cultural History. New York: Broadway Books, 2015.
Barnett, Lincoln. The World We Live In. New York: Time Incorporated, 1955.
Boia, Lucian. The Weather in the Imagination. London: Reaktion Books, 2005.
Bradbury, Ray. Green Shadows, White Whale: A Novel of Ray Bradbury’s Adventures Making Moby Dick with John Huston in Ireland. New York: William Morrow, 1992.
Brown, Slater. World of the Wind. London: Alvin Redman, 1962.
Brydone, Patrick. A Tour Through Sicily and Malta, in a Series of Letters to William Beckford, Esq. of Somerly in Suffolk. London: Strahan and Cadell, 1776.
Bryson, Bill. A Short History of Nearly Everything. New York: Doubleday, 2003.
Calder, Nigel. The Weather Machine. New York: Penguin Books, 1977.
Campbell, David G. The Ephemeral Islands: A Natural History of the Bahamas. London: MacMillan Education Ltd, 1981.
Canfield, Donald E. Oxygen: A Four Billion Year History. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2014.
Chandler, Raymond. The Midnight Raymond Chandler. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971.
Cox, John D. Storm Watchers: The Turbulent History of Weather Prediction from Franklin’s Kite to El Niño. New York: Wiley, 2002.
Dennis, Jerry. It’s Raining Frogs and Fishes: Four Seasons of Natural Phenomena and Oddities of the Sky. New York: Harper Perennial, 1993.
Drye, Willie. Storm of the Century: The Labor Day Hurricane of 1935. Washington, D.C.: National Geographic Books, 2002.
Durlacher, Chris, dir. “Horizon,” Snowball Earth. BBC Television documentary, 2001.
Early Greek Philosophy. Translated by Jonathan Barnes. London: Penguin, 1987.
Elert, Emily, and Michael D. Lemonick. Global Weirdness: Severe Storms, Deadly Heat Waves, Relentless Drought, Rising Seas and the Weather of the Future. New York: Pantheon, 2012.
“The Evacuation from Dunkirk.” newworldencyclopedia.org
Fagan, Brian M. Floods, Famines and Emperors: El Niño and the Fate of Civilizations. New York: Basic Books, 2000.
——. The Great Warming: Climate Change and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations. London: Bloomsbury, 2009.
——. The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History 1300–1850. New York: Basic Books, 2001.
——. The Long Summer: How Climate Changed Civilization. New York: Basic Books, 2004.
Fujita, T. Theodore. Workbook of Tornadoes and High Winds for Engineering Applications. SMRP Research Paper. Chicago: Dept. of the Geophysical Sciences, University of Chicago, 1978.
Gleick, James. Chaos: Making a New Science. London: Penguin, 1987.
Gribbin, John. Weather Force: Climate and Its Impact on Our World. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1979.
Gribbin, John and Mary. Watching the Weather. London: Constable, 1996.
Hamblyn, Richard. The Invention of Clouds: How an Amateur Meteorologist Forged the Language of the Skies. New York: Farar, Straus and Giroux, 2001.
“The Ice Man Cometh,” York University Magazine, Fall 2016.
Jankovic, Vladimir. Reading the Skies: A Cultural History of English Weather, 1650–1820. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.
Kals, W.S.,The Riddle of the Winds. New York: Doubleday & Company, 1977.
Kenda, Barbara, Editor. Aeolian Winds and the Spirit in Renaissance Architecture: Academia Eolia Revisited. Abingdon, U.K.: Routledge, 2006.
Ketjen, Jim. “Evidence the Climate May Go Crazy,” Toronto Star, October 2, 1994.
Klinenberg, Eric. Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago (Illinois). Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.
Kohn, Edward P. Hot Time in the Old Town: The Catastrophic Heat Wave that Devastated Gilded Age New York. New York: Basic Books, 2010.
Kolbert, Elizabeth, “Ice Memory,” in Annals of Science, The New Yorker, January 7, 2002.
Larson, Erik. Isaac’s Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History. New York: Vintage, 2000.
Levine, Mark. F5: Devastation Survival and the Most Violent Tornado Outbreak of the Twentieth Century. New York: Hyperion, 2007.
Lucretius. On the Nature of the Universe. Translated by R.E. Latham, revised by John Godwin. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994.
Ludlum, David M. The Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Weather. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991.
——. The Weather Factor. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1984.
Lee, Laura. Blame It on the Rain: How the Weather Has Changed History. New York: Avon, 2006.
Le Grand, Anthony. An Entire Body of Philosophy, According to the Principles of the Famous Renate Des Cartes, In Three Books. London: Samuel Roycroft, 1694.
Lynch, Peter. “The Origins of Computer Weather Prediction and Climate Modeling,” Journal of Computational Physics 227, 3431-3444, 2008.
Mergen, Bernard. Weather Matters: An American Cultural History Since 1900. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2008.
Moore, Peter. The Weather Experiment: The Pioneers Who Sought to See the Future. New York: Vintage, 2015.
Mykle, Robert. Killer ’Cane: The Deadly Hurricane of 1928. Boulder, C.O.: Taylor Trade Publishing, 2006.
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Rankin, William H., The Man Who Rode the Thunder, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1960.
Resnik, Abraham. Due to the Weather: Ways the Elements Affect Our Lives. Westport, C.T.: Greenwood Press, 2000.
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Shukla, Jagadish, quoted from David Weinberger’s “The Machine That Would Predict the Future,” Scientific American, December, 2011.
Simons, Paul. Weird Weather. Boston: Little Brown, 1997.
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Strauss, S
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Theophrastus of Eresus. On Winds and or Weather Signs, Enquiry into Plants, Volume II. Cambridge: Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, 1926.
Thorphe, Edgar, and Showick Thorpe. CSAT Manual 2012. India: Pearson, 2012.
Timmer, Reed. Into the Storm: Violent Tornadoes, Killer Hurricanes and Death-Defying Adventures in Extreme Weather. New York: Dutton, 2010.
Vitruvius. The Ten Books on Architecture. Translated by Morris Hicky Morgan. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1914.
Watson, Lyall. Heaven’s Breath: A Natural History of the Wind. New York: HarperCollins, 1984.
Weather, Firefly Books, calendar, ISBN 978-1-55297-399
“What’s Up With the Weather?” Frontline. NOVA television documentary, April 18, 2000.
Winters, Harold A. Battling the Elements: Weather and Terrain in the Conduct of War. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1998.
Yeager, Paul. Weather Whys: Facts, Myths and Oddities. Toronto: Perigee Trade, 2010.
Acknowledgments
Firstly, I thank Jack David, Michael Holmes and ECW Press for standing by me all these years. Their continuing support made this book possible. In addition, I thank Susan Renouf, my editor, whose encouraging and thoughtful responses helped guide me through the final stages of this manuscript. I’m thankful also to Rachel Ironstone, who was my managing editor at ECW, along with Susannah Ames, my ebullient publicist and Amy Smith, who handled marketing. I thank my copy editor Crissy Calhoun, who went well beyond the call of duty, as well as Jen Albert, who proofread the manuscript. I am, of course, indebted to Barbara Gowdy for her marvelous ear and sharp eye.
Thanks is due to Bruce Westwood of Westwood Creative Artists who has championed my work for over a decade. Meg Wheeler, also of Westwood, has quietly worked behind the scenes to disseminate my manuscripts. Graeme Gibson responded to excerpts from earlier versions of 18 Miles, as did Margaret Atwood. Their support was invaluable. Thanks is due also to Chris Scott, chief meteorologist of The Weather Network, who reviewed this manuscript for scientific veracity.
John Donlan of Brick Books provided logistical support during the writing of this manuscript, as did Brick, A Literary Journal through the generous agency of the Ontario Arts Council. I must also acknowledge Wikipedia, an extraordinary resource for research, often equaling and sometimes surpassing primary sources. Grateful acknowledgment is due to the authors whose work is cited in the book and listed in the bibliography.
Index
Numbers
12th Street Riot (Detroit), 220–221
53rd Weather Reconnaissance Squadron, 106
54th Weather Reconnaissance Squadron, 64
A
Abbe, Cleveland, 126, 141–142, 148
adiabatic cooling, 117–118, 164–165
adiabatic precipitation, 148
Adler, Lou, 218
Aeolus, 110–111
Aeschylus, on rain, 52
aestival season (summer). See summer (aestival season)
air, density of, 136
Airy, George Biddell, 24
Alberti, Leon Battista, on wind, 109–110
Allen, William, 40
altocumulus clouds, 41, 44
altostratus clouds, 42–44
amino acids, creation of, 10–11
anabatic winds, 118
Anaximander, on lightning, 37
Anaximenes, on wind, 109
Andean-Saharan ice age, 192
Andrew (hurricane), 103
Andronicus of Cyrrhus, 113
Antarctica, 178–179, 186, 190
Anthropocene era, 202
anticyclones, 96, 140
aphelion, 197
Apollo, 157
Arctic
Eocene Optimum, 188–190
ocean cover of, 196
winter in, 156–157
argon, 17
Aristotle
four elements of Earth and, 222–223
Meteorologica, 132–133
meteorological theories of, 38
Arnold, Matthew, on autumn, 167
artificial vacuum, 135
Askesian Society, 40–41
asteroids, 183
collisions with, 8–9, 158
astronauts, 29–30
athenosphere, 227, 232
Atlantic gulf stream, 233
atmosphere
birth of, 7–9
carbon dioxide levels in, 13, 17
escape of, 32
exploration of, 24–25
fluid-like behavior of, 143, 145–146, 153, 203
lapse rate, 35–36
layers of, 22–23
of other planets, 22
oxygen levels in, 17
sensitivity of, 198
thickness of, 22–23
atmospheric cells, 125
See also specific cells, e.g. Hadley cells
atmospheric pressure, 23, 26, 136
atmospheric variables, 145
atomic bomb, 202–203
augers, 130
Aughey, Samuel, 54
aurora australis, 30–31
aurora borealis, 30–31
auroral displays, 229
autumn, 159, 166–169
axis of Earth, tilting of, 157–158, 195–197
B
Bahama Banks, 230–231
Baliani, Giovanni Battista, 134
ball lightning, 82–83
See also lightning
Barbarano, Francesco, 116
barographs, 137
barometers, 25–26, 101, 133–137
barometric pressure, 101, 127, 140–141, 146
Battle of Artemisium, 207–208
Battle of Marathon, 206
Battle of Salamis, 208–209
Battle of Thermopylae, 206–207
Bear, Isabel Joy, 52
Beaufort, Daniel Augustus, 120–121
Beaufort, Francis, 120–123, 139
Beaufort, Mary, 120
Beaufort scale, 120–123
Bergen Geophysical Institute, 145
Bergeron, Tor, 145
Berti, Gasparo, 134–135
bioenergetic analysis, 60
Bjerknes, Carl Anton, 143–144
Bjerknes, Jacob, 144
Bjerknes, Vilhelm, 141, 143–146
blue jets, 80–81
Bock, Fedor von, 215
Bonaparte, Napoleon. See Napoleon
Boreas, 111, 114
Boys, Charles Vernon, 79
Bradbury, Ray
on autumn, 168
on rain, 51
British Meteorological Society, 25
Bruegel, Pieter the Elder, 177
Brydone, Patrick, on wind, 117, 119–120
Bryson, Reid, 124
Budyko, Mikhail, 183
Bullen, Keith, 228
Burroughs, John, on winter, 174
butterfly effect, 154–155, 203
Buys Ballot, Christophorus Henricus Diedericus, 127–128
C
Caesar, Julius, on fortune, 205
Calasso, Robert, 157
Cambrian period, 20
carbon, sequestering of, 19
carbon cycle, 19, 132, 202
carbon dioxide
fossil fuels and, 202
as greenhouse gas, 184–185
levels in Earth’s early atmosphere, 9, 13–14, 16–17
levels in today’s atmosphere, 18–20
lime
stone and, 230
magma and, 229
management of, 20
mantle plumes and, 229
plants and, 19
sequestering of, 202, 229–230
sources of, 19
spike in levels of, 201
from volcanoes, 19, 184
carbon sink, 19
Carleton, Andrew, 200
Carlin, George, on cloud nine, 33
Carmen (typhoon), 101
Carroll, Lewis, on summer, 162
Castlereagh, Viscount, 138
Central Meteorological Institute (Budapest), 195
Chandler, Raymond, on wind, 119
Chapman cycle, 27
Charney, Jule, 151
Chaucer, Geoffrey, 177
chinook, 118
chlorofluorocarbons, 17, 28
Cicero, on storms, 133
cirrocumulus clouds, 41, 44
cirrocumulus stratiformes (clouds), 43
cirrostratus clouds, 41, 44
cirrus clouds, 36–37, 41–44, 148
cirrus incinus (clouds), 42–43
climate change
abrupt climate change, 193
continental plate movement and, 232–233
extreme weather and, 203–204
solar activity and, 178
climate instability, 198–199
climate vs weather, 204
climatic equilibrium, 198
“cloud nine,” 44
clouds
composition of, 35–36, 47
dust and, 34
early theories on, 37–39
funnel clouds, 85
order of, 44
storms and, 73
subthermal property of droplets in, 36–37
water vapor and, 34
as weather, 33
See also individual types, e.g. cumulus clouds
cloud-seeding, 35, 62–65
cold fronts, 145, 147–148
cold lightning, 79
See also lightning
cold of winter, 174–178
Conrad, Joseph
on hurricanes, 105
on wind, 112
continental drift, 181, 224
continents
colliding of, 231–233
formation of, 9
separation of, 189–190
contrails, 35, 200–201
convection, 28, 47, 101, 125, 224
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