From the day when a professor of geology demonstrated how massive beds of limestone could bend under intense pressure, John Ross has been fascinated by the forces that shape the earth’s environment. Neither scientist nor historian, Ross’s schooling in journalism led him to believe that the most important of a reporter’s core questions – what, who, when, where, how, and why – how and why are by far the most interesting.
After decades of writing articles for sporting magazines and books on trout fishing – the first edition of the Trout Unlimited Guide to America’s 100 Best Trout Streams (Falcon Press, 1999) earned him a National Outdoor Book Award – he began to focus more on the story behind the story in the vein of Erik Larson’s Isaac’s Storm and Simon Winchester’s The Map that Changed the World.
Son of a World War II Air Corps pilot instructor, he was weaned on a diet of US military history. Ross knew well that Eisenhower postponed the D-day invasion of Normandy for 24 hours because of the weather. Given the state of meteorology in the 1940s, he wondered: How did Ike know? Over the last decade, he interviewed several men and women who participated in making the all-important weather forecast and scoured archives in England and the United
States for its historic documentation.