Weather Disasters

In May 2016, Fort McMurray, Alberta, the hub of Canada's oil industry, was overrun by wildfire. The multi-billion-dollar disaster turned entire neighbourhoods into firebombs and drove 90,000 people from their homes in a single afternoon. Through the story of this apocalyptic conflagration, John Vaillant explores the past and the future of our ever-hotter, more flammable world.

Man’s struggle against the sea is a theme that has created some of the world’s most exciting stories. Now, in the tradition of Moby Dick comes a New York Times best seller destined to become a modern classic. Written by journalist Sebastian Junger, The Perfect Storm combines an intimate portrait of a small fishing crew with fascinating scientific data about boats and weather systems.

1816 was a remarkable year - mostly for the fact that there was no summer. As a result of a volcanic eruption at Mount Tambora in Indonesia, weather patterns were disrupted worldwide for months, allowing for excessive rain, frost, and snowfall through much of the Northeastern US and Europe in the summer of 1816.

Greg Mullins followed his father into fighting bushfires - it was in the blood. He fought major fires around Sydney and the Blue Mountains for decades, and studied bushfires in Europe, Canada and the US. He risked his life in the 1994 Sydney fires and, later, during our catastrophic Black Summer of 2019-20. As a career firefighter, he worked his way up the ranks to become commissioner of one of the world's largest fire services, Fire and Rescue NSW, for nearly 14 years. When it came to natural disasters there was little, if anything, he hadn't witnessed first-hand.

Learn the science behind weather and weather prediction in this clear and straightforward new guide. Weather is everywhere, and while it's typically not thought about most of the time, it can get everyone's attention in an instant - whether it's the swirling destruction of a tornado, the wreckage from a hurricane, or the havoc of climate change on the environment.

With A Furious Sky, Eric Jay Dolin has created a vivid, sprawling account of our encounters with hurricanes, from the nameless storms that threatened Columbus's New World voyages to the destruction wrought in Puerto Rico by Hurricane Maria. Weaving a story of shipwrecks and devastated cities, of heroism and folly, Dolin introduces a rich cast of unlikely heroes and puts us in the middle of the most devastating storms of the past, none worse than the Galveston Hurricane of 1900, which killed at least 6,000 people, the highest toll of any natural disaster in American history.

Nature has the ability to turn our world into a disaster zone. From blizzards to volcanoes, this series looks at the science behind the destruction. How is a blizzard different from a snowstorm? What causes hurricanes to form? How do you stay safe in an earthquake? Children can answer these questions and more. This volume includes Earthquakes, Heat Waves, and Hurricanes.

Nature has the ability to turn our world into a disaster zone. From blizzards to volcanoes, this series looks at the science behind the destruction. How is a blizzard different from a snowstorm? What causes hurricanes to form? How do you stay safe in an earthquake? Children can answer these questions and more. This volume includes Landslides, Sinkholes, and Tornadoes.

Nature has the ability to turn our world into a disaster zone. From blizzards to volcanoes, this series looks at the science behind the destruction. How is a blizzard different from a snowstorm? What causes hurricanes to form? How do you stay safe in an earthquake? Children can answer these questions and more. This volume includes Tsunamis and Volcanoes.

Nature has the ability to turn our world into a disaster zone. From blizzards to volcanoes, this series looks at the science behind the destruction. How is a blizzard different from a snowstorm? What causes hurricanes to form? How do you stay safe in an earthquake? Children can answer these questions and more. This volume includes Avalanches, Blizzards, and Droughts.

It's hurricane season. Scientists have detected a storm at sea, and it's growing. Learn about how these monster storms form, how scientists track them, and how people respond to their destruction.

The earth is full of natural dangers that everyone should know how to survive. Step up and learn exactly what these disasters are, how to prepare, and the best ways to brave them.

Taking listeners from the melting Alaskan permafrost to storm-torn New Orleans, acclaimed journalist Elizabeth Kolbert approaches this monumental problem from every angle. She interviews researchers and environmentalists, explains the science, draws frightening parallels to lost civilizations, and presents the moving tales of people who are watching their worlds disappear.

An astonishing transformation over the last 20,000 years has seen our planet changed from a frigid wasteland into the temperate world within which our civilization has grown and thrived. This dynamic episode in our planet's history, right at the close of the Ice Age, saw not only a huge temperature hike but also the Earth's crust bouncing and bending in response to the melting of the great ice sheets and the filling of the ocean basins - dramatic geophysical events that triggered earthquakes, spawned tsunamis, and provoked a series of eruptions from the world's volcanoes.

In the span of five violent hours on August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina destroyed major Gulf Coast cities and flattened 150 miles of coastline. Yet those wind-torn hours represented only the first stage of the relentless triple tragedy that Katrina brought to the entire Gulf Coast from Louisiana to Mississippi to Alabama.

In 1934, hundreds of jobless World War I veterans were sent to the remote Florida Keys to build a highway from Miami to Key West. The Roosevelt Administration was making a genuine effort to help these down-and-out vets. But the attempt to help them turned into a tragedy. The supervisors in charge of the veterans misunderstood the danger posed by hurricanes in the low-lying Florida Keys. The hurricane that struck the Upper Florida Keys on the evening of September 2, 1935, is still the most powerful hurricane to make landfall in the US.

Wildfires have been part of the American landscape for thousands of years. Forests need fire—it's as necessary to their well-being as soil and sunlight. But some fires burn out of control, destroying everything and everyone in their path.

Suddenly, when the country caught fire, people realised what the government has not: that climate change is killing us. But climate deaths didn’t start in 2019. Medical officers have been warning of a health emergency as temperatures rise for years, and for at least a decade Australians have been dying from the plagues of climate change - from heat, flood, disease, smoke. And now, pandemic. In this detailed, considered, compassionate book, Paddy Manning paints us the big picture. He revisits some headline events which might have faded in our memory.

Describes the process of how tornadoes can form. Also includes explanations of updrafts, downdrafts, thunderstorms, rotation, and funnel clouds.

Swirling tornadoes, blinding blizzards, and driving rain. Killer storms have wreaked havoc throughout history, especially before reliable prediction tools were available. Follow the deadly paths of history's most dangerous weather events.