Full of interesting and useful diagrams, e.g. showing how warm and cold fronts move differently with the analogy of water added to a bath. It's got me the closest to understanding weather that I have ever been. But it is quite old -- it claims that from the moon the earth's continents would not be visible -- so it would be interesting to know what has been superceded. ( )

Sloane illustrates a basic presentation of the way weather works, in a format originally intended for sailors but expanded and revised so that pilots can learn from it as well.
The simplest form of wind, the daytime sea breeze and the night land breeze, illustrates how heated air moves up and cooler air moves in to replace it. Warm air is lighter; so is wet air. also, air flows from a high pressure area toward a low pressure one. On a weather map, the isobars encircling a high are usually farther apart than those around a low; lows have steeper gradients and higher winds (close isobars are accompanied by wind. At earth levels, wind moves from high to low pressure, crossing the isobars at about 45 degrees. But at altitude, the wind flows with the isobars, clockwise around highs and counterclockwise around lows (in the northern hemisphere).
A front is the front wall of an advancing mass of air of a different temperature. A cold front slants backward and a warm front slants forward. The cold front leaves clear, cold, dry air in its wake, while the warm front leaves warm, wet air behind. The faster, steeper cold front causes shorter, harder rains, while the warm front features longer and slower rains. The cold front covers a hundred miles or less; the warm front might be eight hundred miles long. As a warm front advances, we get the very top first in the form of cirrus mare’s tails, then cirrostratus, a fairly complete web of clouds. Next comes still lower altostratus, almost but not quite opaque to the sun. Finally the low and shaggy nimbostratus arrives with a slow rain. When a cold front advances, its snowplow nose pushed up the warm air into violent thunderheads, with cumulus rapidly becoming cumulonimbus. A faster cold front can overtake a slower warm one, and the result, an occluded front (points and bumps on the same side of the line) results in wind and hard rain and continues to move. But when a cold front collides with a warm front, the result is a stationary front with lingering rain. Winds in advance of a cold front usually flow at right angles to the approaching storm line. Winds blow clockwise out of a high pressure area and into a low pressure area counterclockwise.
Sloane illustrates the way air is heated by the ground, forms a heat canopy which leans with the wind, then breaks free as a thermal cell, and begins to circulate air, bringing warm moist air up to condense and become a cloud. He says there are really only three kinds of clouds: lumps (cumulus), layers (stratus), and icy (cirrus). Alto means high, nimbus means head (rain).
He catalogues the kinds of fog: advection, caused by warm air flowing over cool ground (two variations: steam fog and upslope fog); radiation, caused by the earth losing heat to the night air; and precipitation, relatively warm rain or snow falling through cold air.
Concluding chapters deal with cyclonic winds and atmospheric effects. ( )