Weather lore
Much like regular folklore, weather lore is passed down through speech and writing from normal people without the use of external measuring instruments.
Prevalent in ancient Roman thought, astrologists used weather lore to teach commoners of the star and cloud formations and how they can be used to see the future.
[2] From this, three main schools of weather lore thoughts developed during the Late Middle Ages as Astrology became more popular throughout Europe.
A second type connected with saints' days possessed doubtful validity but was quite popular nonetheless during the Middle Ages.
[1] Before the invention of temperature measuring devices, such as the mercury thermometer, it was difficult to gather predictive, numerical data.
[5] A significant portion of weather occurs in Earth's middle latitudes, between roughly 30° to 60° North and South.
The Sahara in northern Africa, for instance, is almost uniformly hot, sunny and dry all year long especially due to the non-stop presence of high atmospheric pressure aloft, whereas weather trends on the Indian subcontinent and in the western Pacific, for instance, the monsoonal belt, occur gradually over the very long term, and the diurnal weather patterns remain constant.
At sunrise and sunset, the sun is lower in the sky causing the sunlight to travel through more of the atmosphere so scattering more light.
These gusty winds can be unpleasant for a number of reasons; they are often uncomfortably warm, dry, and dusty in the summer and bitterly cold in the winter.
When a low passes to the north, the winds typically pick up from the east, swing to southerly (possibly accompanied by light precipitation, usually not) with the passage of the low's warm front, and then switch to northwesterly or westerly as the cold front passes.
When a low passes to the south, on the other hand, winds will initially pick up from the east, but will gradually shift to northerly.
[13] Calm conditions, especially with clear skies, indicate the dominance of a high pressure area.
A halo around the Sun or Moon is caused by the refraction of that body's light by ice crystals at high altitude.
In order for the air to be cool on a summer night, the sky must be clear, so excess heat can be radiated into space.
It is almost exclusively an urban phenomenon, when the air is so cold that any vapor pressure results in condensation, and additional vapour emitted by automobiles, household furnaces, and industrial plants simply accumulates as fog.
By standing with one's back to the ground-level wind and observing the movement of the clouds, it is possible to determine whether the weather will improve or deteriorate.
It predicts that if the groundhog sees its shadow on this day (February 2), six weeks of winter remain.
[21] In other words, there is no appreciable correlation between cloud cover on that day, and the imminence of springlike weather.
Groundhog Day, observed in the U. S. and Canada, also falls on February 2 and is thought to derive from the Candlemas weather lore in Europe, particularly the German which features the badger as the predictor.
One for Saint-Vallier in Lorraine states: And another from Courbesseaux says that if it is sunny on Candlemas the wolf returns to its cave for six weeks, and if not, for forty days.
While March thunderstorms indicate that the weather is unusually warm for that time of year (thunderstorms can occur only with a sufficiently large temperature difference between ground and sky and sufficient amounts of moisture to produce charge differential within a cloud).
[31] In the British Isles, Saint Swithun's day (July 15) is said to forecast the weather for the rest of the summer.
[citation needed] Sometimes the lore is concurrent with existing conditions, more than prediction, as in: Seagulls tend to sleep on the water.
However, seagulls, like people, find gusty, turbulent wind difficult to contend with, and under such circumstances, the water is also choppy and unpleasant.
Some researchers believe that dogs eat grass as an emetic when feeling ill.[36][citation needed] Centered in the German-speaking world, there was the belief that frogs could predict the weather.
The term Wetterfrosch (weather frog) has survived as a humorous, if somewhat derogatory epithet for meteorologists, insinuating their predictions can not be trusted.
However, since fronts pass at night as often as they do in the day, morning rain is no predictor of a dry afternoon.
Given sufficient surface heating, a late-day rainstorm may continue to develop into the night, produce early precipitation, then dissipate by late morning.
