Immeasurable Weather: Meteorological Data and Settler Colonialism from 1820 to Hurricane Sandy by Sara J. Grossman (review)

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• Immeasurable Weather: Meteorological Data and Settler Colonialism from 1820 to Hurricane Sandy by Sara J. Grossman
• Sara M. B. Simon (bio)

Immeasurable Weather: Meteorological Data and Settler Colonialism from 1820 to Hurricane Sandy By Sara J. Grossman. Durham: Duke University Press, 2023. Pp. 246.

In Immeasurable Weather, Sara J. Grossman explores the historical production of U.S. weather data through an examination of the data's inextricable proximity to power. As the full title suggests, the book spans nearly two centuries. Gross-man covers state incentives to capture weather data, the labor demands required to collect and contextualize data adequately, the eventual militarization of weather data, and the damaging legacies baked into contemporary understandings about the data's utility. Most acutely, the book shows how settler colonialism has been foundational to shaping the U.S. public's conception of data production as an objective form of truth building and as a tool of control: "What was countable could be quantified; what was quantifiable could be known and claimed" (p. 90). Grossman writes about these troubling hegemonic data conceptions with urgency, clarity, and beautiful attention to prose. A sociocultural history of weather data, Immeasurable Weather is a feat both in substance and style.

Immeasurable Weather begins in the early nineteenth century with stories of the steadfast workers—from "academy professionals to weather observers and enthusiasts" (p. 29)—who filled out weather tables tediously, helping to construct a national project of data collection. As Grossman describes, this system of volunteer labor laid the groundwork for a shared cultural narrative around knowledge production and nation building (ch. 1). The book's second chapter builds on this theme of data labor by examining the national network of white women weather data workers who compiled and calculated information for the Smithsonian Meteorological Project. Next, Immeasurable Weather recounts late nineteenth-century efforts to gather upper-air data automatically and remotely, through the male-dominated [End Page 720] domain of meteorological kite technologies (ch. 3). The book moves into the twentieth century by further examining the professionalization of weather data, interrogating the shift away from careful, hand-produced data forms and toward a more systematized and automated network of continuous data streams (ch. 4). In the final chapter, Grossman examines the power consolidated and obtained through satellite meteorology, noting how government agencies like the Department of Defense and the Central Intelligence Agency have supported the development of U.S. weather data systems.

Grossman provides evidence for her claims through a fascinating collection of letters, data forms, instruction manuals, and institutional reports. Throughout the book, these primary sources work in conversation with interdisciplinary scholarship, making the book relevant to readers across fields, from Grossman's own discipline of environmental studies to fields like Indigenous studies, disability studies, and critical data studies. Historians of technology will be especially excited by the book's descriptions of the early "producers, computers, compilers, and caretakers" (p. 13) of weather data, often women hired cheaply and working from home, outside of public view; Grossman connects these stories of data workers to similar research by scholars like Jennifer Light and Mar Hicks, showing not only how human labor has always been foundational to data-making processes but also how the public's conception of technological progress is shaped profoundly by infrastructural labor, however hidden these backstories may be.

Many key themes throughout Immeasurable Weather will be worthwhile to scholars interested in the critical study of data, automation, and technology. Historians of technology will find intriguing connections between the militarization of weather data and the rise of wartime computing. Indeed, Grossman's book complements Kristine C. Harper's Weather by the Numbers (2008), which explores the electronic digital computer's role in professionalizing numerical weather prediction. Additionally, Gross-man's accounts of weather data being stripped of its complexities for the sake of standardization will be familiar to readers of Cal Biruk's writing on the production of public health data, or of Dan Bouk's writing on both life insurers and the U.S. census. Grossman also offers sharp critiques of how real-time weather data streams and visualizations distort the public's notion of crisis, detaching data from "the lived...