Air Apparent

Air Apparent shows how the weather map has taken on a variety of forms throughout the last four centuries––moving from a hand-eye executed graphic object to a computer-printed and later digitally displayed graphic––by tracing “graphical code” across a lengthy set of primary source materials, including maps, radar and satellite images. As a cartographic historian, Monmonier begins </span><span>Air Apparent</span><span> with an inquiry into the set of cartographic inventions that laid the foundation for Heinrich Wilhelm Breslar’s 1816 weather map, the first weather map of its kind. In chapters 1 and 2 we learn about the invention of isogons (1630) and isobars (1777), both graphic predecessors of the isotherm (1817). Monmonier also mentions a few early American and European weather collection efforts forwarded by the Meteorological Society of the Palatinate in 1781 and James Espy at the Franklin Institute in 1834. There are dozens of additional weather facts in chapters 1 and 2, so much so that both chapters present more raw data than engaging with textual or cartographic analysis. This continues throughout chapters 3 “Weather by the Wire” (an inquiry into the ways that telegraphic transmission fundamentally altered weather predicting, forecasting, and cartographic rendering) and 4 “Looking Up” (which discusses the early twentieth-century initiative to map the upper atmosphere). Such data dumping is in fact necessary given that Monmonier’s work is the first cartographic history that attempts to account for almost four centuries worth of cartographic development in the field of weather. While it is an exhausting read, it is also a necessary and exciting one. Chapters 5 and 6 continue to offer material on the history of weather forecasting in the age of computer modeling and electronic graphics. The last four chapters document weather mapping in the age of newspapers, and finally satellite and radar technology.

Monmonier, Mark

Monmonier, Mark S. Air Apparent: How Meteorologists Learned to Map, Predict, and Dramatize Weather. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.

Grossman, Sara

English

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