Larson's narrative recreates the storm, its watchers and its victims, and captures the nightmare that can occur when hubris and the terrifying power of nature collide. His work has appeared in a number of national magazines, including Harper's , The New Yorker , Time and Atlantic Monthly . You've said that you approach research in the way that a detective would. I like to bring a lot of different things together. It's really more detective work, at least in my mind, than the traditional historical method of slogging through books in libraries.
Weather is one of the most important things that all too often gets left out of books.
It can really color a reader's perception of an event or a place in ways that nothing else can. There are some tremendous resources for getting very specific information about what the weather was in a particular place in a particular time, one of these being the Monthly Weather Review by the U.S. Weather Bureau. It's got everything from about 1880 on. It's a tremendous resource. And if you work hard enough, you can figure out what a place smelled like.