Every day there will be an article published somewhere in the world about life-threatening weather or a changing global climate. We’re not short of news content, occasionally spiced with a liberal dose of hyperbole. However, until now there have been few accessible and up-to-date sources of reference helping the reader to understand the scientific principles creating the weather and climate.

Professor Adam Scaife is head of Monthly to Decadal Prediction at the UK Met Office and honorary visiting Professor at Exeter University. Picture: Simon Hammett, Met Office.

Professor Adam Scaife, a world-class scientist specialising in long-range forecasting, recognised this gap when he was invited to create a new book: 30-second Meteorology. Adam put together a team of weather and climate experts and collectively they invite readers to take half a minute to digest each of the 50 most important topics in modern-day meteorology and climate science.  From the North Atlantic Oscillation and jet streams to rainbows and sundogs, this book will take readers to the edge of our current knowledge.

30 Second Meteorology is published by Ivy Press.

In the book’s introduction, Prof Scaife said: “You can open this book at any point or immerse yourself in a complete chapter at a time. However you approach the 50 topics, I urge you to speculate on what is to come. Before the advance of atmospheric science, weather forecasters were ridiculed for their dream of predicting the future, but the ever-increasing accuracy of weather forecasts is a reality and this makes them an essential tool to society worldwide. Even long-range predictions of the average weather from months to years ahead are now possible and, in some cases, point towards dramatic future events. Some of these forecasts are destined to become ever more critical and they are unfolding right now, as you read this book, when the globe is warmer than ever recorded before.”