(Part 2) Top products from r/meteorology

I have three.

The first that comes to mind is an older book, called "Storm." It inspired my dad to become a meteorology major (sadly, the U.S. Air Force put him to use as a navigator instead of weather forecaster). The hero / heroine of the fictional story is a massive El Niño / atmospheric river event that rocks California, told in part from the perspective of a young meteorologist. It's an older book (copyright 1941), but despite being short on contemporary weather science, it's solid on the fundamentals, and the major criticism of it is that it's too technical. As a record of a storm pattern that often afflicts the U.S. West Coast (and historically has been catastrophic at times) and is only now coming to be fully appreciated, it's still relevant, even though it's out of print, but Amazon offers it used.

"Isaac's Storm" is a national bestseller about the greatest natural disaster in U.S. history, the 1900 Galveston hurricane, which killed 6,000 people. It talks a lot about the weather that created it and how meteorologists of the time failed to anticipate it (and why). It's a gripping, well-written account of a storm that shocked the nation and devastated a city that might have otherwise become Texas' largest. It's written by Erik Larson, who is one of the great nonfiction writers of our time.

You are probably familiar with the movie "The Perfect Storm" but maybe not with the book that inspired it, also a national bestseller, titled "The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men Against the Sea" which dwells a lot more than the movie on the weather science behind the storm. In fact, the phrase "a perfect storm of" didn't exist before the book. If I recall correctly, it talks about how three separate weather events converged over the NW Atlantic to create a truly wicked storm that caught a number of mariners off guard with deadly consequences for some of them. The movie is pretty good (certainly better than that joke "Twister" that someone recommended), but it's a little short on weather geekery.

Sorry, no colorful pictures in any of these books, but the stories in them are plenty colorful. Congrats on your awesome study choice.

An Introduction to Dynamic Meteorology by James Holton is probably the most commonly used dynamics book. Another one that I really like is Mid-Latitude Atmospheric Dynamics: A First Course by Jonathan Martin.

As far as thermodynamics goes A First Course in Atmospheric Thermodynamics by Grant Petty is a good one.

I tried to navigate around openstax but didnt really see a way to search or much that was meteorology related.

in order of simplest to most mathematically challenging

https://www.amazon.com/Weather-Analysis-Dusan-Djuric/dp/0135011493/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1473884598&sr=8-1&keywords=meteorology+djuric

a non math oriented person could get through this book, but its an excellent introductory text and you will still be able to make math/fluids connections to it (gradients, laplacians, curl, etc)

https://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/0271056436/ref=sr_1_1_olp?ie=UTF8&qid=1473884505&sr=8-1&keywords=midlatitude+meteorology+carlson

a bit dated, but comprehensively presents the foundations of basic meteorology principles and goes into detail on one of the foundational principles (quasigeostrophic theory). is also written to help with literal forecasting of weather system development, movement, and decay.

https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Dynamic-Meteorology-International-Geophysics/dp/0123540151/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1473884739&sr=8-2&keywords=dynamic+meteorology

the bible. this is first semester grad school meteorology material. starts with building blocks of meteorology and rapidly advances. if you understand this book inside and out, youre qualified to start courting russ schumacher for a assistantship at one of those fancy CSU grad school meet n greets.

Stuart Walker has two books about intuitively predicting local surface winds written for sailors that are excellent. The more recent of the two is called The Sailor's Wind.