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All these folk sayings, derived from long experience, are now much less useful than they once were. Atmospheric pollution has contaminated the signals and made them more erratic.

And of course satellite surveillance and accurate weather forecasting has made them, to some degree at least, redundant. A year or so ago I fell into conversation with a very old man on the wharf at Tancook Island, in Mahone Bay. His family had been lighthouse keepers in the area for three generations and he'd been a ferry boat skipper, and I figured him for a rich store of wind and weather lore.

"What'll the weather be this afternoon, Warren?" I asked.

"Oh," he said, squinting at the sky, "it'll blow a little, then some rain."

"How do you know?"

"Oh," said Warren again, as bland as could be. "I heard it on the radio this morning."

II

Weather forecasts are "right" somewhere between 50 and 80 per cent of the time. Depending on your definition of "right," and on the time frame, it could be worse than that, or better. In climatically unstable or variable regions, the five-day forecasts are notoriously unreliable, and it can be curious how often the fifth-day prediction seems to promise sunny or particularly pleasant weather. But before you sneer, think of the difficulties. The American Meteorological Society described it this way, its defensive tone entirely justified: "Imagine a rotating sphere that is 8,000 miles in diameter, with a bumpy surface, surrounded by a 25-mile-deep mixture of different gases whose concentrations vary both spatially and over time, and heated, along with its surrounding gases, by a nuclear reactor 93 million miles away. Imagine also that this sphere is revolving around the nuclear reactor and that some locations are heated more during parts of the revolution. And imagine that this mixture of gases continually receives inputs from the surface below, generally calmly but sometimes through violent and highly localized injections. Then, imagine that after watching the gaseous mixture, you are expected to predict its state at one location on the sphere one, two, or more days into the future. This is essentially the task encountered day by day by a weather forecaster."10

This more or less inspired weather-related guesswork goes back a long way into recorded time. It is known that the Mesopotamians, the people who gave the world the Hanging Gardens, were trying to correlate short-term weather changes with cloud cover and haloes around the sun and moon as early as 600 B.C. The Chinese, in their more formal and courtly way, tried to codify the weather even more, and around 300 B.C produced a calendar dividing the year into twenty-four segments, each associated with a particular weather pattern. Aristotle's four-volume Meteorologica, in which he dealt not just with wind but with thunder and lightning, hail and clouds as well, remained the standard text until the seventeenth century.

But weather forecasting as we know it, which is essentially a means of tracking wind and air systems and their effects, began in Europe, especially Germany, in the eighteenth century, when networks of towns shared weather observations. It started more formally in America and in Britain in the mid-nineteenth century. The Smithsonian Institution, newly founded, was by the mid-1850s having weather data telegraphed to its offices from those parts of the country that had been reached by railroad, and therefore the telegraph. In the same decade it cautiously, and very much after the fact, began to compile the first national weather maps. The Civil War put a brief stop to these efforts, but in 1865 a series of strong winter gales sank a number of ships on the Great Lakes, prompting the resumption of weather-data collection. A year or two later Cleveland Abbe, director of the Mitchell Astronomical Laboratory in Cincinnati, established a weather telegraphy service. The U.S. Army joined in, and then the Smithsonian again, and by 1870 President Ulysses Grant ordered the establishment of a formal army-run