"From the acclaimed author of Tubes, a lively and surprising tour of the infrastructure behind the weather forecast, the people who built it, and what it reveals about our climate and our planet. The weather is the foundation of our daily lives. It's a staple of small talk, the app on our smartphones, and often the first thing we check each morning. Yet behind these quotidian interactions is one of the most expansive machines human beings have ever...

"Weather is what we experience every day, while climate describes the statistics of weather phenomena computed over a long period of time, say at least a season, ideally a few years. With the term 'statistics' we mean first of all the average conditions, computed by considering many different events. We also mean the variability of weather phenomena around the average conditions: in other words, how intense and frequent are the weather variations...