By Brian Cosgrove
A photo-driven reference that takes on the whole sky, from how a single cloud forms to what a hurricane does, built to be opened anywhere rather than read straight through.
The DK Eyewitness approach put to weather: real instruments and specimens photographed on clean white pages, captions packed around them, so whatever page you open drops you into the middle of something. It works through how weather actually runs, the way air moves and warms and cools, why a front brings a change in the sky, how clouds and rain and snow form, what's going on inside thunder and lightning, and how frost, fog, and ice come about. There's a good stretch on the instruments people built to read the sky, the barometers and weather vanes and rain gauges, and how forecasters use them to make a guess at tomorrow. And there are the big violent events, hurricanes and tornadoes and floods and what they leave behind. Nothing connects one spread to the next. That's on purpose; you graze it.
What sets a weather reference apart from a shark or a volcano one is that the subject is right outside the window. Your child can study the cloud pages, then step out and find those exact clouds overhead, which turns a browse book into something they can check against the real sky. It's built for a strong reader who wants the mechanics rather than a narrative, and since there's no front-to-back to finish, it gets pulled off the shelf and reopened instead of read once and put away.