Winds of War

Beschreibung

How a bizarre and highly classified WWII weapon inadvertently revealed the massive, high-altitude winds that shape our global weather.
Today, the jet stream is a basic fact of global travel and meteorology. We rely on these massive, high-altitude rivers of air to shorten commercial flight times and predict winter storms. Yet, less than a century ago, the existence of these 200-mph winds was entirely unknown to Western science. The discovery of the jet stream was not made by peaceful academics observing clouds, but forged in the desperate final years of global conflict. It required high-altitude bomber missions encountering impossible headwinds, and a bizarre, highly classified weapons program launched from the other side of the planet. This book chronicles the fascinating intersection of meteorology and military history. It details how the Japanese military weaponized these unknown currents by launching thousands of explosive paper balloons across the Pacific, and how American scientists scrambling to understand this strange attack inadvertently mapped the atmospheric superhighways. See the sky through the eyes of its first explorers. You will learn how wartime necessity accelerated our understanding of the planet's atmospheric mechanics, forever changing global aviation and the science of weather prediction.

Autor*in

Reginald K. Oliver
Author

Themen in »Winds of War«

jet stream discovery wwii meteorology japanese balloon bombs atmospheric science military aviation history of science weather forecasting

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