Sarah Zambello (text) and Susy Zanella (illustrator), Wind Atlas: Everything You Need to Know About the Wind, Thames & Hudson, July 2025, 80 pp., RRP $34.99 (hbk), ISBN 9781760764517
The Zambello and Zanella team supported by Thames & Hudson and the University of Genoa have produced another attractive atlas-style science book in a series that now explores all you need to know about Clouds, Waves, and Wind. And what a lot there is to discover about wind. These atlases are generally as much about culture, history, myth and literature as they are about science, which is one of the qualities that makes the series so refreshing and unique.
This atlas too is a mix of such sources making a beautiful book that still conveys what a complex phenomenon the wind is. Wind begins with the relatively light warm, moist air around the equator rising while heavier, cooler, denser, drier air slips down to replace it. The result is the turbulence we know as wind. Then it is all about how pressure, heat, earth-spin, the effect of the ‘Coriolis Force’ on the north and south hemispheres, the three cells of air on the planet, and weather fronts combine to make the regions, seasons, cyclones, tornadoes, storms and even the calmest of days.
Along the way we meet some remarkable individuals including Francis Beaufort, a nineteenth century sailor who devised thirteen descriptive grades for wind, and the self-taught genius Ted Fujita, who developed theories in the middle of the twentieth century that made it possible to measure the force of a tornado. Even today tornadoes are still measured by a Fujita Scale.
There is much to absorb, much to enjoy, and much to admire in this marvellous and professionally designed book. Highly recommended
Reviewed by Kevin Brophy
