Human attempts to work out the weather
Find out the facts and myths of predicting rain or shine.
Humans have long tried to predict the weather accurately. From the hunters and gatherers of ancient times to today’s pilots and farmers, predicting the weather can make the difference between success and failure. Accurate forecasts also save lives. They help sailors stay safe at sea, and help officials warn people about storms. They shape our daily lives, too, like when to walk the dog or wrap up warm. Nowadays, the methods are very high-tech but in the past people studied birds, cows and insects for clues as to what might happen.
Ancient forecasting
In 650BC the Babylonians (who lived in what is now Iraq and Syria) tried to predict the weather based on the appearance of clouds and other things such as halos (rings of light that form around the Sun or Moon). Around 340BC, Aristotle, a famous Greek thinker and scientist, wrote Meteorologica. It included theories about types of weather, including rain, wind and lightning. Aristotle believed that there were rings of elements – water, air and fire – surrounding the Earth. Although some of what he wrote did turn out to be true, some definitely didn’t, including his idea that clouds couldn’t form above the highest mountains because the air there contained fire.
It was almost 2,000 years before his ideas were replaced by new theories. By 300BC in China, a calendar had been developed that divided the year into 24 festivals, each festival connected with a type of weather. This was useful for farmers to plan when to plant seeds and harvest their crops.
The scientific and the not-so-scientific
People have used lots of ways to predict the weather over the years. You might have heard the expression “red sky at night, shepherd’s delight”,
which suggests a red sky in the evening is followed by good weather. This has a basis in science, as does predicting the weather using pine cones, which close up when bad weather is on the way to protect the seeds inside. Some studied the smoke from their fire or mist on nearby hills, which would show wind direction or how much water vapour was in the air – both affect the weather.
On the other hand, some thought that if sheep huddled together or cats groomed themselves carefully it meant rain. Groundhog Day in the US is another bad indicator. Every 2 February, people gather to watch a groundhog called Punxsutawney Phil emerge from its burrow. The legend says that if it sees its own shadow there will be six more weeks of winter. It has been right in four of the last 10 years.
Technology helps out
The science of weather forecasting really took off in the 1830s with the invention of the telegraph. This is a device that can send messages by wire over long distances, and it meant people could send each other weather information. Weather maps were drawn up, wind patterns were identified and storm systems were studied. The next big step came in the 1920s with the invention of the “radiosonde”. This is a balloon that carries weather instruments (which measure things like temperature and moisture) high above the ground to gather information. Experts take that information and build a picture of the weather over the following few days. Today, the
Met Office (the weather service for the UK) uses lots of measurement tools and predicts the weather with the help of supercomputers. These take huge amounts of data from all over the world and process it very fast to work out developing weather patterns.