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18 Miles

Page 25

by Christopher Dewdney


  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.

  Procipious. History of the Wars, Books III and IV: The Vandalic War. Translated by H.B. Dewing. Cambridge: Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, 1924.

  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.

  Seneca. Naturales Quaestiones. 2 volumes. Translated by T.H. Corcoran. London: Heinemann, 1971.

  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.

  Singh, Devendraa, A.K. Singh, R.P. Patel, Rajesh Singh, R.P. Singh, B. Veenadhari, and M. Mukherjee. Thunderstorms, Lightning, Sprites and Magnetospheric Whistler-mode Radiowaves. http://arxiv.org/pdf/0906.0429.pdf.

  St. Clair, Chris. Canada’s Weather: The Climate that Shapes a Nation. Toronto: Firefly Books, 2012.

  Strauss, S
arah. Weather, Climate, Culture. Toronto: Perigee Trade, 2010.

  Theophrastus of Eresus. Concerning Weather Signs, Enquiry into Plants, Volume II. Cambridge: Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, 1926.

  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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