This is a really interesting book, written for lay people, that does a great overview of Earth’s atmosphere. I really enjoyed this – I had at least heard of most of the things that were covered, but this book went into detail about a number of the phenomena, and covered the scientists that had discovered these things.
It’s funny – I forget sometimes how recently we’ve discovered some things. The ability to go into orbit around the Earth was very important in identifying the features of our atmosphere, but in some cases, it was just confirmation of things that scientists had conjectured about, but had no way to prove before.
I really like this author – she’s able to turn some fairly dry concepts into easily understood concepts. I definitely need to track down the last book of hers that I haven’t read yet.