ROUCH. L’Atmosphère et la prévision du temps. Édition Armand Colin. Paris, 1924.

Rouch. The Atmosphere and Weather Forecasting.

Rouch’s book is intended for a wide circle of readers familiar with the basic laws of physics. The author has made a rather successful attempt to present, in an accessible form, without any mathematical complications and in a very compressed form, an account of the most essential chapters of general meteorology and of the methods of weather forecasting. The book is written in an easy and interesting manner and contains only 200 pages of small format. The first part of this work, occupying about a quarter of it, is devoted to methods of observation, the description of instruments, and corrections to their readings. It is precisely this chapter that may give rise to the most substantial objections, since it is insufficiently coordinated with the rest of the book’s contents. Anyone who knows the instruments will find much here superfluous, while anyone entirely unfamiliar with them will hardly be able to understand them after reading only a brief description and without even seeing their illustrations, since this part contains no illustrations whatever. The second part is devoted to the results of observations; it is set out quite clearly, gives chiefly general conclusions without an accumulation of numerical material, and is accompanied by a whole series (17 illustrations) of climatological maps, which serve as an excellent supplement to the text. Unfortunately, these maps, because of their small size and the desire to show the distribution of one or another element over the entire surface of the earth, lose a considerable part of their value. One cannot fail to note, incidentally, that in this chapter several pages are, for some reason, devoted to optical phenomena in the atmosphere, whereas nothing at all is said about the composition and height of the atmosphere. The last part is devoted to the question of weather forecasting and, perhaps better than the others, approaches the solution of the task set by the author. In a very lively exposition it does indeed introduce the reader to this interesting field and enables him to understand what possibilities are now opening before us and what practical significance the solution of this question has. It is quite incomprehensible why the author did not consider it necessary here to include at least a few synoptic charts, which in themselves could have told the thoughtful reader a great deal.

I believe that a reader with a good general education will read this book easily and with undoubted benefit. It will help him understand many phenomena occurring in the atmosphere, and will give him a correct idea of the methods and possibilities of weather prediction in particular.

G. Rakhmanov.