Tim Woollings' book is a grand travelogue of weather, history, and geography, all connected to the winds that circle our globe and the people who have tried to understand them. Anyone who has watched a weather forecast and has wondered why the air does what it does will find this book fascinating. The science is up-to-date and accurate; Woollings doesn't settle for ordinary close-enough-but-wrong explanations but instead explains how weather and climate systems really work. You'll be amazed and awestruck at everything that happens to produce that puff of wind against your cheek.
Tim Woollings obtained his PhD in Meteorology in 2005 and since then has worked on a variety of topics spanning weather prediction, atmospheric dynamics and circulation, and the effects of climate change. He has studied how the jet stream varies over weeks, years, and decades, and how we can better predict these changes. He has been a contributing author on three chapters of the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report. Tim has worked at the University of Reading as a postdoc, research fellow and then lecturer before moving to the University of Oxford in 2013. He is now an Associate Professor in Physical Climate Science, leading a team of researchers in the Atmospheric Dynamics group. He teachers various courses on the fundamentals of geophysical fluid dynamics and atmospheric circulation.