On February 5, 1745, John Jeffries was born. Jeffries was one of the first systematic observers of weather in the American colonies, making daily measurements of the Boston weather beginning in 1774. In his honor, his birthday is celebrated as National Weatherperson's Day. The day recognizes the skills and accomplishments of meteorologists and weather forecasters, both professional and amateur.

Amateurs have been responsible for significant advances in our understanding of weather. The snowflake photographs of W. A. Bentley are one example. Beginning in the 1880s, Bentley developed a technique for photographing individual snowflakes. Despite the technical limitations of photography at the time, his photographs were so well made that they remained among the finest such photographs ever taken for the next century. Some of his 5,000 photos are collected in Snowflakes in Photographs (e-book, print).

Kathleen Sears provides an introduction to the basics of weather forecasting in Weather 101 (e-book, e-audio).John D. Cox's Storm Watchers (e-book) is a history of our progress in attempting to predict the weather, from Ptolemy's 2nd-century attempts to make forecasts based on astrology to modern technology.

Bill Streever looks at the history of our relationship to two major weather phenomena in Cold (e-book, print) and And Soon I Heard a Roaring Wind (e-book); Cynthia Barnett does the same for Rain (e-book, print). And Lee Sandlin focuses on the history of one specialized group of weather observers – storm chasers – in Storm Kings (e-book).

Storms are among the most terrifying, and most fascinating, weather phenomena. There's now a small library of books about large storms throughout history and their consequences. David Laskin's The Children's Blizzard (e-book, e-audio, print) tells the story of a sudden blizzard that hit the upper Midwest in 1888, just as children were walking home from school on what had started out as a relatively warm day. The 1900 hurricane in Galveston, Texas, is still the deadliest natural disaster in US history; it's the subject of Erik Larson's Isaac's Storm (e-book, print). Kim Cross reports on the 2011 tornado outbreak, when more than 300 tornadoes hit the southeastern United States in three days, in What Stands in a Storm (e-book, e-audio, print). And in Ghosts of the Tsunami (e-book, e-audio), Richard Lloyd Parry looks at the 2011 tsunami that led to the Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster.

Also This Week

• February 1, 1884: The first section of The Oxford English Dictionary, covering "A to Ant," was published. The OED is a comprehensive historical dictionary, including obsolete words, and providing historical citations to demonstrate the changes in usage and meaning of each word over time. Work on the dictionary had begun in 1857, and James Murray had been the editor since 1879. Murray gathered his historical citations through what we would now call "crowdsourcing," asking readers and amateur linguists to submit examples. Simon Winchester's The Professor and the Madman (e-book, e-audio, print) is the story of Murray and one of his most prolific contributors, W. C. Minor.
• February 4, 1918: Ida Lupino was born. Lupino was a moderately successful actress in the 1930s and 1940s. She often clashed with studio bosses, refusing to take roles that she thought were undignified; as a result, she was frequently suspended. During one of her longer suspensions, Lupino founded her own production company and became one of the first female producer/directors in Hollywood. She directed seven feature films between 1949 and 1966, often focusing on social issues that the larger studios wouldn't touch. Lupino's 1953 film noir The Hitch-Hiker is available for streaming at Kanopy; it's the story of two friends attempting to escape from a serial killer while vacationing in Mexico.
• January 31, 1926: Chuck Willis was born. Willis was a popular R&B singer and songwriter of the 1950s who often performed wearing a turban, which led to his nickname "the Sheik of Shake." Several of his songs were popular backgrounds for a dance called The Stroll on TV music shows, and Willis gained a second nickname, "the King of the Stroll." By the late 1950s, he had begun to cross over to the pop audience with his biggest hits, "C.C. Rider" and "What Am I Living For." Willis died in 1958 at the age of 32, during surgery for stomach ulcers. His complete 1951-1956 recordings for Okeh Records are available for streaming or download at Freegal.
• February 2, 1948: Ina Garten was born. Garten is a cookbook author and TV chef. She has no professional culinary training, and began her food career when she purchased a gourmet food store called The Barefoot Contessa in 1978. She did much of the cooking for the store herself, and published her first cookbook in 1999. It was an unexpected success, and in 2002, Garten began her Food Network program The Barefoot Contessa, which is still in production. Several of Garten's cookbooks are available as e-books or in print.