Weather is a slippery subject. Place-bound for one, the most meaningful observations about it, those rooted in experience, have to do with a microclimate at best, a region at most. Weather for most of us is simply time, or the most conspicuous aspect of time, which is reflected in the French and Spanish words for weather, le temps, el tiempo.

In "Braving the Elements: The Stormy History of American Weather," David Laskin has chosen to clamp the subject of weather into three major categories: the weather in history, measuring and forecasting weather and future climate changes. He uses the great East Coast blizzard of March 1993, which affected more than 100 million people, as a point of departure and as the centerpiece of his chapters on the present state of forecasting. In all, he has reshaped the rather amorphous subject of the weather into the bearing of climate on culture, and technological progress in measuring weather events and climatic change in North America.

In the historical area, the book forms a collection of gleanings from archeological and historical sources. Climate changes opened up the Siberia-Alaska land bridge 12,000 years ago, inviting settlement from Asia, as did the warm period known as the Medieval Optimum, during which the Vikings established settlements in Newfoundland around AD 1000, while the little ice age of the Renaissance, Laskin suggests, was a goad to the great age of European exploration and colonization.

The comparatively severe weather of North America, which lacks any east-west mountain ranges to slow arctic fronts, drove American colonists farther and farther west, a flow hyped in the 19th century by railroads and land speculators with the utopian phrase "rain follows the plow"--as for a while it seemed to, into Kansas and Nebraska and eastern Colorado. But those anomalous wet years were followed by drought, eventually yielding the harvest of the Dust Bowl, the greatest ever man-made weather event at least until the discovery of what seems to be global warming.

In the 12th century, climate changes also ended the great settlements of Chaco Canyon, whose descendants resettled into the much diminished but more sustainable communities of the river valleys of northern New Mexico, where their small-scale irrigation practices were adopted and refined by Latino settlers from the 17th century onward. In his 1879 "Report on the Lands of the Arid Region of the United States," explorer John Wesley Powell pointed out the potential folly of large-scale settlements in the arid Southwest of the sort that now carpet the desert in what Mark Reisner describes as "a beautiful fraud."