For
almost twenty years, I was a Contributing Editor for two of this country’s
leading travel magazines. At the same time, I wrote for a major publisher of
travel guide books. This writing had to
do with the specifics of weather and climate at a variety of travel
destinations. All of these destinations
were selected by the various publishers.
For
most of my professional life, I have been a professor of atmospheric sciences. My two academic specialties have been
climatology (that is, the study of the sum total of the weather over long
periods of time at various places) and atmospheric physics (why the atmosphere
does what it does). Teaching and
research over the years have given rise to studies of particular places for one
reason or another. Some of those places
appear as destinations. While not always
major travel destinations (some are rather off the beaten track), they usually
have climatic characteristics that interested me.
Since
my retirement from academic life, I have worked from time to time as a
Consulting Climatologist for various client—most of them from the travel
industry. Some of the destinations are
those in which these clients expressed an interest.
All
together, these activities have produced a somewhat strange assortment of
destinations. If I had started out to
cover the world even-handedly, I would have made a quite different selection. As it is, what you see is what there is. At my present age (79), I am no longer
interested in adding new destinations. I
now devote my free time to atmospheric physics