Instant Weather Forecasting: You Can Predict the Weather
By Alan Watts
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About this ebook
This revised and updated 5th edition takes into account the new ways users can receive professional weather forecasts, factor them into their own cloud observations, and develop an even better understanding of how the weather will change.
This bestselling gem of a book will continue to be invaluable to anyone participating in outdoor activities, from farming, gardening and walking to riding, golfing, flying, sailing, fishing - and of course holidaymakers.
Alan Watts
Alan Watts, one-time professional meteorologist, spent considerable time studying wind changes and short-term alterations in the weather. This, combined with his enthusiasm for sailing which began with the sea scouts, enabled him to assist people to read the weather from the signs in the sky. He died in May 2020.
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Book preview
Instant Weather Forecasting - Alan Watts
A 24-colour photograph guide to weather forecasting from the clouds, for use by walkers, farmers, fishermen, yachtsmen, golfers, holidaymakers – in fact for anyone to whom the weather in the near future is of vital importance.
Contents
Preface to the Fifth Edition
How to use this book
General note to the reader
The Crossed Winds Rules
Explanation of terms used in the text
Facts about clouds
Beaufort Scale of wind force
1Jet stream cirrus
2Cirrus and cirrostratus
3Warm front or occlusion approaching
4Altostratus ahead of a warm front or occlusion
5Imminent rain or snow
6A front passes
7Thundery sky
8Thunderstorm
9Warm sector weather
10Sea and coastal fog
11Showers
12Air mass trough
13Cumulonimbus
14Quiet evening
15Red sky at night
16Cirrus foretelling improvement
17Will it thunder?
18Will it rain?
19Fair weather cumulus
20Cirrus revealing no change
21Stratocumulus
22Stratus
23Altocumulus and cirrocumulus
24Coastline clouds
Preface to the Fifth Edition
In the hot summer of 1967 I reluctantly sat down to write Instant Weather Forecasting. It was an idea that I had recently tried out on James Moore, who was then Editor of the Adlard Coles imprint of Granada Publishing. He seemed more than keen that I should write this little book but I was busy putting together a physics textbook and I did not want to be deflected from, what seemed to me, this important work. I soon found that James was right—the physics textbook never saw the light of day but Instant Weather Forecasting has been in continuous print ever since its spectacular launch in 1968.
Up to that point I had only written two books with relatively small print runs, and I was staggered to find my publishers doing an initial printing of 75,000 copies so that they could supply the editions of foreign publishers across Europe as well as in America. Jim even felt confident enough to call a press conference to launch the book. I found myself writing captions to a bevy of my sky pictures for the prestigious Sunday Times Magazine. I found it amazing that my little book was heading the ‘Hidden Best Sellers’ list. It was a heady time for a young author.
The reviews were everywhere excellent. The reviewers seemed to respond to a book about the difficult subject of meteorology which they could immediately relate to, even if they didn’t fully understand how I’d arrived at the inferences quoted in the book.
It is this chance to dive straight in and play the forecasting game as well as the attractiveness of the full-page pictures that explains why Instant Weather Forecasting has been so successful and is now being re-launched after almost half a century. That small beginning has now developed into an extensive library of transparencies covering all aspects of the sky, as well as interesting phenomena like rainbows and sundogs, jack frost patterns, and the fairyland that develops when freezing fog paints trees with hoar frost. However, such otherwise irresistably photogenic pictures are not for this book. Instant Weather Forecasting is an essentially practical book. It does not contain many of my most spectacular pictures simply because they do not properly illustrate the aspects of weather being discussed.
Instant Weather Forecasting cannot be used everywhere in