Meteorology, made real

The weather a pilot flies through, shown as it really looks: real photographs, live models and short, plain explanations.

The air around us

• Chapter 1: The Atmosphere The thin layer of air wrapped around the Earth: what it is made of, how it changes as you climb, and the standard atmosphere every altimeter is built on.
• Chapter 2: Atmospheric Pressure and Altimetry What pressure is, why it falls with height, and how one pressure gauge, the altimeter, tells a pilot how high they are, and when it lies.
• Chapter 3: Temperature How the sun heats the Earth, how the Earth loses that heat again, and why the coldest moment of a clear night comes just after sunrise.
• Chapter 4: Air Density Why the same aircraft needs a much longer runway at Leh on a summer afternoon than at Mumbai on a winter morning: air density and density altitude.
• Chapter 5: Humidity The invisible water in the air: how much there is, how much the air could hold, and what happens when it is cooled until it can hold no more.

Wind, cloud and weather

• Chapter 6: Winds Why the air moves, why it never blows straight from high to low, how it changes near the ground and with height, and the local winds that pilots meet.
• Chapter 7: Visibility and Fog What steals a pilot's view of the runway, from Delhi's winter fog to dust haze and volcanic ash, and the delicate balance that makes radiation fog form.
• Chapter 8: Vertical Motion and Clouds Why air rises and sinks, the ten kinds of cloud it makes, and how cloud is measured, reported and flown through.
• Chapter 9: Stability and Instability Why some air shoots up into towering storms while other air lies flat as fog: the three lapse rates, and the one comparison that decides it.
• Chapter 10: Optical Phenomena Rainbows, halos, coronas and glories are clues: each tells a pilot what the cloud is made of, and whether it will ice up the aircraft.
• Chapter 11: Precipitation How a cloud's tiny droplets grow big enough to fall, which cloud gives which kind of precipitation, and why Mumbai is drenched while Pune stays dry.
• Chapter 12: Ice Accretion How supercooled water turns into ice on a wing, why clear ice is the worst, which clouds and temperatures to fear, and how a carburettor can ice up on a warm day.

Storms and weather systems

• Chapter 13: Thunderstorms How a thunderstorm is born, lives and dies, everything it can do to an aircraft, and India's own spring storms.
• Chapter 14: Air Masses, Fronts and Western Disturbances The great bodies of air that cover the Earth, the battle lines where they meet, and the weather each front brings as it passes over you.
• Chapter 15: Jet Streams The narrow rivers of very fast wind near the tropopause: what they are, where India's two jets blow, and where inside them the air turns rough.
• Chapter 16: Clear Air Turbulence Turbulence with nothing to see: where it hides around jet streams, mountains and storm tops, and how to get out of it.
• Chapter 17: Mountain Waves When strong, steady wind crosses a mountain range in stable air, the air bounces in waves for 100-200 km downwind, with lens-shaped clouds above and violent rotors below.
• Chapter 18: Tropical Systems and Cyclones The weather-makers of the tropics, from the ITCZ to the monsoon depressions and the great tropical cyclones of the Bay and the Arabian Sea, and how to fly around one.

India's climate and the global winds

• Chapter 19: Climatology of India One country, four seasons: follow the sun across India's year, from the winter fog of the north to the monsoon and the post-monsoon cyclones, and learn what each one means for a pilot.
• Chapter 20: General Circulation The planet-sized wind machine: why the tropics are rainy, the deserts sit at 30°, the trade winds blow so steadily and mid-latitude weather drifts from west to east.

Met services, codes and charts

• Chapter 21: Meteorological Services for Aviation Who in India and the world makes the weather information you fly on, what each product is, how long it is valid and when you have to ask for it.
• Chapter 22: Weather Radar and Met Satellites How radar sees rain inside clouds and how satellites watch the whole sky, and how to read what they show without being fooled.
• Chapter 23: Met Instruments Every number in a METAR comes from an instrument. Which one measures what, and in which unit?
• Chapter 24: Station Models How a whole weather observation is squeezed round one small circle on a chart, and how to read it back.
• Chapter 25: METAR, SPECI and TREND How the weather at an airport is squeezed into one coded line every half hour, and how to read it back as a picture.
• Chapter 26: Aviation Weather Forecasts How a forecaster writes the next 9 to 30 hours of an airfield, an area or a route in a few lines of code, and how to read it back hour by hour.
• Chapter 27: Radar Report, SIGMET and Satellite Bulletin Three ways a met office passes on what it is seeing right now: a radar picture sent as numbers, a warning in plain-language short forms, and a written summary of the satellite image.
• Chapter 28: Met Documentation and Briefing What the met office gives you before you fly, how it decides what goes in your folder, and how heights are written on it.
• Chapter 29: Flight Forecast T-3 and Cross-section T-4 The two forms a forecaster fills in for a route when charts cannot be sent: a table for short routes and a side-on picture for long ones.

Exam practice

• Chapter 30: Mixed practice Three mixed tests, one question from every chapter. Each answer tells you which chapter to revise.