Category types, draw pictures, and make up proverbs. How did the ancients "look at the clouds and know the weather" thousands of years ago?
Many areas have experienced continuous high-temperature weather this year. Taking Shanghai as an example, particularly beautiful clouds always appear in the sky at dusk. Through experience, we have found that clouds on hot days are always particularly beautiful. In fact, in Thousands of years ago, ancient people judged the weather by looking at the shape and color of clouds.
To give the most common example, in summer we can find that as long as there are convective clouds, there will be thunderstorms. Meteorological experts believe that this is because when there is a big difference between the bottom temperature and the upper temperature, Up and down movement will occur to form convection. This movement will gradually lower the warm air until the water vapor condenses. The clouds formed at this time are convective clouds, and this convection movement will cause thunderstorms. At the same time, the characteristics of this kind of cloud are also very obvious. The convective cloud changes greatly within a day. The cloud body is relatively fluffy and the shape is diverse. Especially in the evening, it will be more obvious.
In fact, the color of clouds can also identify the weather, because sunlight will be scattered after entering the atmosphere, and different colors of light will be scattered according to the difference in the solar spectrum. If the sky is clear, the colors will appear in various colors. It is an optical fiber with brilliant colors, but if it is a hot day, part of the blue light will be lost during the scattering process, and the remaining light will show a special red or orange color. Therefore, clouds on high-temperature days usually appear particularly hot.
In fact, the ancients have known the weather by looking at the clouds for thousands of years. There are also related records in the Book of Songs, so there are many related proverbs. In the Tang Dynasty, the Rain Book of Times was the first book to predict weather based on physical phenomena. Most of these contents were later supported by meteorology. For example, clouds composed of fish scales are called cirrocumulus clouds, which are signs of strong weather. During the Ming Dynasty, atlases of corresponding changes in clouds and sky appeared, which also provided models for future generations to observe the weather. After the founding of the People's Republic of China, weather stations across the country also carried out cloud and sky observations, and significant progress was made in understanding the weather by looking at clouds.