Weather in the wrong hemisphere

Press, 8 April 1978, Page 15

Weather in the wrong hemisphere

Practical Weather Forecasting. By Frank Mitchell-Christie. Reed. 96 pp. (Reviewed 'by R. A. Crowder)

In the southern hemisphere one becames used to having to accept that ail knowledge stems from Europe. Many people must have sympathy for the Wizard of Christchurch who published his upside-down map of the world to better orientate us to our real position.

‘Practical Weather Forecasting” is a readable book, full of facts some more accurate than others. Having found several diagrams with Mount Blanc shown at 20.000 ft (or was it 6000 metres?) and learnt that the continent of Australia in summer was always covered by tropical maritime air, I found myself constantly running to other texts to check whether the ocean was really covered in drift ice only 500 miles (or was it 800 km?) south of Australia.

The text covers in clear and simple terms the definition of weather, the wind and clouds, how air .masses determine the weather, and explores the effect of altitude and air flow around the world. It is. however, a book for the Northern Hemisphere and although mention is made (in brackets) about the southern hemisphere almost all the Illustrative work is based on northern hemisphere circulators systems.

If this book is intended for the peneral reader to gain a working knowledge of weather and climate then it has to be simple and clear. Informing New Zealand readers that they must mentally juxtaposition all the diagrams from anti-clockwise depression to a clockwise one, and all

the high pressure clockwise concepts to anti-clockwise ones, is really asking quite a lot of the antipodean reader. The constant references to the veering and backing of winds in association with frontogenesis must also be confusing to someone not yet familar with the concept of reversed air flow patterns in the southern hemisphere.

Much of the information is useful if you can make the mental effort to reverse the diagrams, especially the chapter on weather at sea, which should be useful for the many sailors in New Zealand. The final chapter on making your own weather charts is fascinating, but useless under New Zealand. Surely it is not beyond the necessary is just not made available to New Zealanders.

I find it disappointing that this book should have to be released in New Zealand. Surley it is not beyond the scope of the publishers to commission

a simple text in which more familiar, correctly oriented figures could be provided. The British Isles has a unique climate involving the mixing of strongly divergent oceanic and continental air masses. New Zealand, on the other hand, has a very simple pattern of basic weather types, but very complex physiographic diversity caused by the south-west, north-east, orientation of a mountainous land mass across the basic westerly flow. There is a great need in New Zealand to educate the public to the ways of the weather, not only because of their affinity for going to sea in small boats but also because of the increasing popularity of climbing, skiing. tramping and hunting. This book will do little to meet the need. [Mr Crowdet is a senior lecturer in the Department of Horticulture, Landscape and Parks at Lincoln College.]