Hint:
Ra
Thor
Babylonians
Renaissance
Galileo
Pascal
Halley
Halley
Benjamin Franklin
Franklin
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In this series of lectures about the history of weather forecasting,
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I'll start by examining its early history -
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that'll be the subject of today's talk.
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Ok, so we'll start by going back thousands of years.
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Most ancient cultures had weather gods,
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and weather catastrophes, such as floods,
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played an important role in many creation myths.
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Generally, weather was attributed to the whims of the gods,
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as the wide range of weather gods in various cultures shows.
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For instance, there's the Egyptian sun god Ra,
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and Thor, the Norse god of thunder and lightning.
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Many ancient civilisations developed rites such as dances
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in order to make the weather gods look kindly on them.
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But the weather was of daily importance:
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observing the skies and drawing the correct conclusions from these observations was really important,
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in fact their survival depended on it.
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It isn't known when people first started to observe the skies,
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but at around 650 BC,
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the Babylonians produced the first short-range weather forecasts,
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based on their observations of clouds and other phenomena.
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The Chinese also recognised weather patterns,
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and by 300 BC,
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astronomers had developed a calendar which divided the year into 24 festivals,
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each associated with a different weather phenomenon.
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The ancient Greeks were the first to develop a more scientific approach to explaining the weather.
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The work of the philosopher and scientist Aristotle, in the fourth century BC, is especially noteworthy,
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as his ideas held sway for nearly 2,000 years.
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In 340 BC,
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he wrote a book in which he attempted to account for the formation of rain, clouds, wind and storms.
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He also described celestial phenomena such as haloes -
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that is, bright circles of light around the sun, the moon and bright stars - and comets.
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Many of his observations were surprisingly accurate.
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For example, he believed that heat could cause water to evaporate.
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But he also jumped to quite a few wrong conclusions,
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such as that winds are breathed out by the Earth.
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Errors like this were rectified from the Renaissance onwards.
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For nearly 2,000 years,
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Aristotle's work was accepted as the chief authority on weather theory.
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Alongside this, though, in the Middle Ages,
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weather observations were passed on in the form of proverbs,
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such as 'Red sky at night, shepherd's delight; red sky in the morning, shepherd's warning'.
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Many of these are based on very good observations and are accurate,
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as contemporary meteorologists have discovered.
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For centuries, any attempt to forecast the weather could only be based on personal observation,
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but in the fifteenth century scientists began to see the need for instruments.
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Until then, the only ones available were weather vanes - to determine the wind direction -
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and early versions of rain gauges.
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One of the first, invented in the fifteenth century, was a hygrometer, which measured humidity.
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This was one of many inventions that contributed to the development of weather forecasting.
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In 1592, the Italian scientist and inventor Galileo developed the world's first thermometer.
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His student Torricelli later invented the barometer,
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which allowed people to measure atmospheric pressure.
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In 1648, the French philosopher Pascal proved that pressure decreases with altitude.
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This discovery was verified by English astronomer Halley in 1686,
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and Halley was also the first person to map trade winds.
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This increasing ability to measure factors related to weather
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helped scientists to understand the atmosphere and its processes better,
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and they started collecting weather observation data systematically.
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In the 18th century, the scientist and politician Benjamin Franklin
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carried out work on electricity and lightning in particular,
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but he was also very interested in weather and studied it throughout most of his life.
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It was Franklin who discovered that storms generally travel from west to east.
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In addition to new meteorological instruments,
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other developments contributed to our understanding of the atmosphere.
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People in different locations began to keep records,
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and in the mid-nineteenth century,
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the invention of the telegraph made it possible for these records to be collated.
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This led, by the end of the nineteenth century, to the first weather services.
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It was not until the early twentieth century that mathematics and physics became part of meteorology,
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It was not until the early twentieth century that mathematics and physics became part of meteorology,
