The China Meteorological Administration has issued another orange rainstorm warning. How was weather forecasting done in ancient times?
In ancient times, there were three ways to forecast weather. The first is to predict based on the behavior of animals; the second is to summarize the twenty-four solar terms and some agricultural proverbs through agricultural production practices; the third is to make predictions based on celestial phenomena and the thickness and color of clouds.
The conditions in ancient times were limited and not as powerful as today's technological development. People are self-sufficient farmers who rely on crops for their livelihood. They rely on crops to solve their food and clothing problems, so harvests are very important. People use various methods to predict simple weather. When people gradually understood that weather had a great impact on their crop harvests and daily travel, they tried to find patterns in life. So probably during the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period, the crystallization of the common people's wisdom? Twenty-four Solar terms are produced. Later, descendants of later generations also gradually developed new wisdom based on the twenty-four solar terms and ascending experience of their predecessors, such as some agricultural proverbs, such as: the autumnal equinox is early, the frost is late, and the cold dew is the right time to plant wheat.
People also make predictions about the weather based on some of the daily behaviors of animals. In fact, this is also very accurate, because animals' senses are more acute than humans. People also concluded that before it rains, swallows will generally fly very low, ants will crawl out of their holes to move, earthworms will crawl out of the soil, and frogs in the pond will keep chirping, etc. If you wake up in the morning and see water droplets on a web woven by a spider, then it must be a sunny day with the sun shining brightly.
The ancients also summarized some peculiar weather phenomena based on the thickness and color of the clouds. Taking hail as an example, if there are black and red clouds in the sky, then this kind of cloud is a hail cloud. Then it indicates that there will be hail or hail rain soon. Also, the white clouds in the sky look like fish scales, so it must be a very suitable day to dry rice because it is a sunny day. To sum up, it can be seen that the ancients mostly relied on observations and summaries of daily life for weather forecasting.