The book design is pretty basic, but that made it very easy to read. There are lots of diagrams, graphs, and drawings, and cartoons that help make it fun. The topic of weather is okay, but isn’t super interesting. This book, however, made it interesting, because it described how it happens all around us every day. I thought the activities were good, and they helped me understand the book. In fact, most of the book was the activities. You make your own amateur weather station using ordinary materials found around the house. Some things you could do quickly and easily, such as building a precipitation meter. Others took days, building an anometer, for example.
     What I liked most were the many stats and facts. Did you know that Lioro, Columbia gets as much rain in half an hour as Arica, Chile gets in one year! I also liked the part about the clouds. They are an accurate way to tell the weather, and all you need is yourself! What I liked least was calibrating your instruments. There were lots of equations to convert the measurements to the “official” kind of reading, e.g., from rpm (revolutions per minute) on the anometer to km/h (kilometres per hour). If I could change anything, I would change the design a little—make it less plain and add some colour. Overall, I enjoyed this book. I learned lots of facts, stats, and phenomena I didn’t know about weather—it really is a complicated and interesting topic.
     To describe the book in one word, I’d say: awesome! I would give it a score of nine out of ten and would recommend it to readers ten years of age and up.

(Originally published in the May/June 2001 issue of YES Mag.)