By Mark Monmonier.  University of Chicago Press; 310 pages; $17
and £11  AS WELL as being one of the world's most handy
conversational openers, the weather is ever more something that
people enjoy watching on television and reading about in their
newspapers. The Weather Channel, an American cable channel that
shows nothing but weather analysis around the clock, attracts
legions of “weather junkies” with insatiable appetites for
pressure diagrams, temperature charts, satellite loops and
Doppler radar scans; and no daily newspaper is complete without
an elaborate and colourful weather map. Mark Monmonier, a
geographer at Syracuse University, traces the history of visual
representations of the atmosphere, from the first map of trade
winds, which was sketched by Sir Edmond Halley in 1686, to
modern television and newspaper graphics.  Appropriately for
someone who is best known for having discovered a comet, Halley
used tiny comet-like marks to indicate wind direction, an idea
that did not catch on. The first reco