life in stormy north carolina.
by Lynn Thomasson
North Carolina Weather & Climate. By Peter Robinson. The University of North Carolina Press, 227 pages, $39.95 cloth, $24.95 paper.
From heat waves to ice storms, Indian summers to hurricanes—nature deals wild cards when it comes to weather in North Carolina. “I think we get a little bit of everything,” says Peter Robinson, Carolina professor of geography and former state climatologist.
In his new book, North Carolina Weather & Climate, Robinson writes about the history of North Carolina weather, the science behind it, and what we can expect in the future.
Robinson retraces the development and effects of major weather events in North Carolina, including the “storm of the century” in 1993. Pressure changes morphed a normal frontal system near the Gulf of Mexico into a major storm that dumped heavy snow, blew in one-hundred-mile-per-hour winds in the mountains, and churned ocean waters against the coast. The damage from the storm’s wrath left 300,000 homes across the state without power.
This year we’ve seen hurricanes with strength as devastating. Robinson says it hasn’t always been this way. After analyzing a century of North Carolina hurricane data, Robinson says some decades have seen few hurricanes, with sometimes no hurricanes in a given year. “If you look at the record, hurricanes come in clumps of years, and we’re in one of those clumps,” Robinson says.
The factors behind the creation of a new hurricane still remain something of a mystery to scientists, Robinson writes. Each time one of these wind-and-water-whirling monsters rolls in, scientists gain another opportunity to study how they work. Robinson writes that until we understand these complex, fickle weather systems with greater accuracy, we must rely on general indicators such as sea surface temperature for a prediction.
Robinson explains how day-to-day weather forecasts work, the science behind Doppler radar, and satellites that can sense weather patterns. “The first thing you always have to do is look outside because sometimes things will go wrong with the official forecast,” Robinson says. “If you start making observations, you soon notice that you are often a little bit warmer or colder than the official forecast.” With these observations and a little bit of knowledge about how weather works, Robinson says, you start adjusting the forecast to where you live.