Review of CLOUD WARRIORS

Where meteorology meets social science

Tl;dr – A good read showing the intersection of forecasting science and social science. Each chapter highlights a single weather event, the breaking science behind improving forecasting, and the challenges meteorologists face when communicating risk to the public.

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I wanted to become a meteorologist when I was a kid. I was fascinated by weather, especially extreme weather. Growing up in the Midwest, I was used to heavy, severe thunderstorms with tornado watches; ice and snowstorms causing schools to be closed for the day. And with extreme weather comes the need for people to respond to that weather appropriately to stay safe.

For a lot of dumb reasons, I ended up becoming a psychologist, but in Cloud Warriors: Deadly Storms, Climate Chaos―and the Pioneers Creating a Revolution in Weather Forecasting Thomas E. Weber gives me hope that perhaps a career in psychology could still be a path to meteorology.

No matter where you are in the world, you’ll deal with some form of severe weather. Just in the United States alone, most of the country will deal with either tornadoes, hurricanes, heat waves, or flooding. And what keeps you safe in the face of these extremes is a good forecast from meteorologists telling you when and where disaster will strike so you can get out of the way.

As Weber shows in Cloud Warriors, weather forecasting has rapidly improved over the decades along with technology. Tornado warnings can now give 10 minutes notice for folks to get to shelter. Hurricane forecasting pinpoints landfall locations and storm surges with increasing accuracy. But watches, warnings, and forecasts are only as good as the lives they save.

For example, last week when I was reading about the recent deadly floods in Texas, the New York Times was interviewing a survivor in the area affected. She said that she did hear the warning come through on her cell phone, but “since alerts are common” she just “went back to sleep”. This is exactly the kind of problem forecasters are struggling with today.

Forecasting involves incredible amounts of data and complexity, but translating that into effective, clear, actionable communications is a different challenge. Weber travels the country to interview and learn from forecasters of all sorts of weather to learn how they are overcoming these communications challenges. From Immersive Mixed Reality on The Weather Channel to show what storm surge from a hurricane will look like to modifying the language on alerts to ensure the meaning is translated along with a change in language.

Cloud Warriors gave me a new appreciation for how big the world of forecasting is, how far it reaches into our lives. We hardly think of it when we open our smart phones to check the forecast for the afternoon to see if it’s going to be windy or rainy for our plans, or when we’re checking the snow forecast for the season in hopes of magical powder days.

My only negative of the book is that I felt the organization was off. Each chapter focused on a different type of problem – tornado, hurricanes, heat, seasonal forecasting, local forecasting, etc. But they were all mixed up in some very non-obvious order. Is a small negative but I still don’t see the organization that was intended.

It’s a good book, especially because I don’t come across many books on the science of weather – drop some recommendations in the comments if you have them!

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Published: June 2025

Publisher: St. Martin's Press

Format: Hardcover

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If you think this sounds interesting, bookmark these other great reads:

• A Natural History of the Future: What the Laws of Biology Tell Us about the Destiny of the Human Species (2021) Rob Dunn

• Meltdown: The Earth Without Glaciers (2012) Jorge D. Taillant

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