Scientifically Sound Weather Superstitions

you do. So yesterday when that ominous front was rolling through Atlanta and we were looking out the windows, were you were your knees like buckling? No, my my right knee, which is the one that speaks to me. It was fine then, But earlier in the week, like the day before and the day before that, that's when I felt it and I was thinking, oh, well, maybe the thing that they always say is true, and that means that some sort of weather front is coming in. Is that right?

Me an old gaming injury. No, it is a dancing injury, actually dancing in the field. You know, there's a whole you know how it goes. I do. My favorite, my current favorite non scientific weather forecasting tool is it has to do with the chalk drawings that I do with my son in the driveway. The more that accumulate, I know, the more likely it is to rain. So once we reached the point where we've covered every foreseeable space with scribbles and elephants, I know that it's got to be

about to rain, because it means like two weeks is past. Okay. I like that. It is a method. It's a method. You know. It's based on observational data in my surrounding environment, and I look to it and I make a distinct call about what the weather may or may not do. And this is one of those things whether that we kind of take for granted because we've got the little Doppler radar systems in place, we can easily access information

about the weather whenever we want. But you kind of, if you want to think about whether in really big terms and even cosmic terms, you have to go all the way back to when the atmosphere actually even developed. And we won't go, you know, too deep into this, but just consider for a second that atmosphere that life depends on is created by life itself. So whether you have back in the earliest of days when the Earth

formed really just rudimentary. We're talking about hydrogen and helium hanging out on Earth, and not for very long either, because hydrogen and helium are fast moving molecules, and at that time in Earth's very young history, it was a hot planet, and so they sped up even more in the escape out into space. But then you have much later volcanic activity happening. And with this volcanic activity happening,

you have steam escaping right from the volcanoes. You have H two O, you have carbon dioxide, you have ammonia which contains nitrogen, and you begin to see this sort of base stock of the atmosphere building up. And then a bit later you have the carbon dioxide being absorbed

by oceans. And this is great because now a bacterium comes to comes to be and it gets a lot of this energy from the Sun and from the carbon dioxide in the oceans, and it's byproduct as a result is oxygen, and all of a sudden boom, you have the elements for an atmosphere that's right. Currently our atmosphere

consists of seventy percent nitrogen oxygen. Then you have point nine argon point O three carbon dioxide, and the remaining point of seven consists of water, vapor, hydrogen, ozone, neon, helium, crypton,

and xenon. Right. Instead, the more that life developed, the more the these molecules were created and came to create this envelope, this atmosphere that we live in, and it became so supportive that it supported complex life, such as say humans that became acutely aware of the tides of wind, of the moon and the sun and began to obsess about it. Yeah, I mean, indeed, I mean this is the movement of our environment. We live in the atmosphere. We live on the Earth, but we are we're slaves

of the atmosphere. And the better we can understand it, the better we can predict it all the better. Now, how long have we been keeping records of what the weather is doing, because obviously we've been obsessing over the weather since time out of mind. But when you look at observation data, generally you go back to around nine UM and because that's when observation stations became more uniform in the way that they were collecting the data and

measuring it. So if you need to start point like that's the easiest place to go to, right, But there were other systems in place before that, but not as uniform, right, not as uniform. For instance, UM the England and Wales precipitation series, which measures rainfall and snow, that goes all the way back to seventeen sixty six. The Central England Temperature series, which covers temperature from the south the Midlands to Lancashire, goes back to sixteen fifty nine. But again,

nineteen that's generally modern UM forecasting start date. Right now. A lot of people will point to that date too and say, oh, this is when we began to really UM record information about hurricanes, and maybe that's why it seems like there are more hurricanes lately because we only

have this limited data set, which may be a possibility. Yeah, I mean that's always a concern when you're looking at at patterns in our atmosphere and patterns and climate, is that the records, the dependable records, only go back so far. But again, we have been uh trying to forecast the weather since uh our earliest days. It's pretty much one

of the earliest sciences tackled by any given culture. Because you know, as we after the agrarian revolution especially, we have crops that need watering life depends on the cycle of the rains, the shrink and swell of the local river, the coming of the monsoons, UH, the advance of dangerous weather patterns UM you know, and again this is particularly important for agriculturally bound societies that are depending upon this

artificially maintained version of vegetation that requires water, that requires UH and again, like all of us is as a slave to the atmosphere UM. And then as we develop the surplus of these items, we start warring with each other. So military navigation also becomes key. You need to know what the weather is doing because you want to UH, you want to game your advantages in trying to attack or defend yourself from your adversary. And when you take that situation on to the ocean, you have even more

can turns to deal with. There are several cases in history, of course, where see weather has saved a nation from an invading army, particularly in the case of the Japanese being saved by the divine wind protecting them from Mongol invasion. The fate of the Spanish armada headed towards towards England, so it becomes important from a military standpoint, to be able to tell what the weather is going to do.

It's important from an agricultural standpoint, and then when you get into trade as well on the seas, you need to be able to accurately depend on how this uh, this this atmosphere is going to behave because on on the ocean especially, this is a situation where the weather can see you safely to your harbord destination or it can just utterly destroy you and your economy in the

blink of an eye. Right, and before we had accurate meteorological instruments to help us with this, to you know, to accurately measure temperature, accurately measure pressure in the air, and then compare that to our records over time. What can you turn to? You turn to uh idioms, You turn to time warn lore, um different sayings that are based on observational data uh that deal with what the

weather may be about to do. Yeah, and then on top of that you have the cultural layer, right, so you have all of the traditions that are bound up with weather in the seasons. And so this kind of guiding principle of you know, sayings based on observational data sometimes take on more of a superstitious quality, and people begin to see these as guiding forces. And that's all well and good, except that some are actually helpful and

some are not. So we're going to talk about the ones that are actually rooted in in the scientific soundness. Indeed examples where they're scientifically grounded at the route and the game of cultural telephone has not really lost the truth of it over time. All right, So we'll roll one out for you. Now. Um, let me get one of my best sailor voices. I guess here, red sky in the morning sailors take horn and red sky at

night sailor's delight. There you go. Uh So, of course, what we're talking about here is that blood red sky, that the kind of fucia and red sky co mingling. And what's behind it, Well, you're seeing a scattering of sunlight by small particles, but they're they're suspended in dry,

dusty air. And that's key here because at sunset, these conditions imply a zone of dry high pressure between you in the sun, and since weather in the mid latitudes moves mainly west to east, that means a day of clear sailing is on the horizon for the next day. But if you witness the same scattering of red wavelength near sunrise, it implies that the calm high pressure zone and has already passed and that a stormy low pressure system could move through soon. So again, take the perspective

of someone who does not have Doppler radar at their disposal. Um, you know, they're hanging out in the sixteen hundreds. They need to go out on the boat the next day. Their livelihood depends on it. These sort of signs and symbols present to you in the sky would become really important, but they're not always correct. A lot of this depends on where you stand on the earth. Um, okay, because this is very true, this sort of red sky in

the morning. Sailors take warning for those who are in the mid latitudes, which include most of North America, Europe, and Asia, as well South Africa and the southern halves of South American Australia. But if you are in the polls or in the tropics, where weather tends to progress in the opposite direction, you'd want to reverse the saying. Okay, it's no cultural right. You go to one part of

the world and they have a totally different thing. Yeah, and of course that's going to come into play with the globe try and sailors obviously. Alright, another one, and this is what I had not heard of before. Um if a few different versions of it, now haul out my sailor voice too. Mackerel sky and Mayor's tale will make lofty ships carry low sails. Mackerel in the sky, three days dry, mackerel sky, mackerel sky, never long wed

and never long dry. Now that that I hear that, and I have no idea what that even means, right, because I don't know what the mackerel sky is, what a mayor tail is, And then what does it mean that ship carries low sails? You're waiting for Grendel to appear, right, Yeah, Like when I first read it, I thought low sails, like maybe that means that there's not enough wind filling

up the sails. But what it's actually saying is if you look up in the sky, gentle sailor, and you see a fish or a horse tail, Uh, there's a storm approaching, and you better lower your sails to protect them from the accompanying high winds Okay, which at least to the question, what on earth is acral sky? Well, mackerel sky known in Germany and France as sheet clouds. These are large is a large, spreading assemblage of clouds that resemble a series of waves or fish scales, with

streaks of blue sky peeking out between the puffs. If you look at pictures of this that it kind of looks marble to a certain extent. And then you have Mare's tails, which are long thread like cirrus clouds, often

stretched by strong high level winds. And when we're looking at this, what we're observing, uh, this all consists of serial cumulus and alto cumulus clouds, which means there's moisture high up in a cold sky at an altitude of around eighteen thousand and thirty thousand feet or six thousand to ten thousand meters. Uh. Simply put, these are the cloud systems that develop prior to a storm. Um. And the blue streaks that you see indicate that the clouds

are breaking up due to instability in the air. So why is it correct? Well, again, these are these are the cloud systems to developed tend to develop prior to a storm. Uh. And both the clues, whether you're talking Mackerel's or mayors suggest an impending storm about six to eight hours away. If the clouds proceed in approaching warm front, they'll thicken and the winds will veer from northwesternly to

more southwesternly directions. Now, if not, if the clouds mostly consist of bigger, darker auto cumulus clouds, then you're likely facing better weather in the short term in advance of a possible cold front and an associated thunderstorms. So as a general rule, the mackerel mayor sky thing holds out, but it's kind of up in the air, no pun intended um as to whether you're actually talking about strong winds coming in or if you're talking about better weather

in the short term followed by potential thunderstorm. Yeah, and again this isn't full proof, but it's the best gus based on weather patterns and knowing what happens when conditions change, right, And I think people pay attention to these kinds of forms today because maybe they're they're cloud porn enthusiasts, but really people would again stare at the sky in earnest

to try to figure out what was going to happen. Yeah, you have to stake your life on something when it comes to navigation, and this, some simple idiom are saying, is ultimately better than nothing. This is all well and good, but tell me, Julie about my knee. What is going on with my knee? And it speaks to me, well, yeah, I gotta say you're You're not alone obviously in feeling

this way. And in fact, Hippocrates, the father of Western medicine, noticed that certain illnesses seem to worsen under particular weather conditions. And you've probably heard people say it, you know, time over time, like I can feel it, I can finish weather coming. And according to Dr Aditya. Matto, writing for n y U longown online Journal of Medicine, quote surveys have demonstrated the upwards of any percent of patients believe

that weather plays a role in their arthritic pain. The question is whether or not this is, in fact, uh an actual thing. And I will say that the jury is a bit out on this, okay, But you can look at a two thousand and seven study by Mcallendon at all. It's a multi site study which followed two hundred patients with knee osteoarthritis over different times of the

year and used a well validated paining questionnaire. Called WOMAC and data from the U, S, O, A, A, and UH compared knee paying with different atmospheric conditions throughout the continental US. What they found was statistically significant positive correlations. Now why would this be. It's because your body is responding to atmospheric pressure. You don't think about it, right, because you don't necessarily feel it, But your bodily fluids are trying to exist in a constant state of balance

with ambient air pressure. So as the barometer falls, as with what happens with an approaching storm, your tissues can swell in response, and that can irritate nerve endings and cause your pain level to wratch it up a bit. Okay, problem here is that that swelling happens on such a small scale that it's it's difficult to objectively detect and measure it. So researchers have to rely on people's subjective accounts of pain, which, as we know, vary and they're

not always reliable. And there's also the psychological factor of priming. Right, So you see approaching storm, maybe you start to feel achy. Maybe you're paying just a little more attention to that ever present condition, right, right, So that's not to say there's not something there, it's just the jury is truly still out on that. However, those who suffer from migraines may have a level of sensitivity to their environment that

gives them a leg up on predicting the weather. And according to Dr Caroline Bernstein, who is the clinical director of the Harvard Medical Faculty Physicians comprehens of Headache Center, quote, it maybe that people who get migraines are very susceptible to any fluctuation, whether it's a weather change, foods, sleep, or stress. Okay, well, I will keep that in mind the next time I feel my knee talking to me. Yeah, just see if your head hurts. Alright. That brings us

to our next one. This one is cold as the Night when the stars shine bright, also known as clear moon frost soon. So what is this one? That's basically things basically saying, hey, if you have a clear sky, it's going to be a cold or night, right, pretty straightforward And and really the explanation of this one is pretty straightforward too. So it gets into the basic realities

of how the sun heats our world. The Sun emits a vast amount of energy travels across space in the form of short wave radiation, and only a tiny portion of this power actually reaches the surface. Um Most of the atmosphere, fear is directly heated by solar radiation, but rather by the terrestrial radiation that the planet itself emits. So during the day, the Sun's shortwave radiation is absorbed

by the Earth and converted into heat. The examples I often go back to when explaining this are, Okay, you have a fried egg and you're gonna cook it on a sidewalk in New York because you need some sort of visible display of how hot it is for the local news. Well, it's the heat emitted by the pavement that's doing the frying, not the sun above. And that's basically the reality of heat on our world. Also, you

have a mountain climber. They're climbing up a mountain they're in encountering increasingly colder conditions as they ascend, despite effectively moving closer to the sun. Okay, so when the sun sets, the planet begins radiating this heat at various rates depending on the materials involved, and lacking clouds to capture that heat and hold it in place, the surface and atmosphere

grow increasingly colder through radiative heat loss. So essentially, again, solar energy coming down hitting the Earth, it's emitted as terrestrial radiation, and if there aren't clouds up there to keep it and contain it, it just goes off into space again. So yes, indeed, if you have a night with no cloud cover, it is going to be colder because you're going to have more heat loss. That makes sense because the clouds are kind of like a blanket

on the night exactly. Yeah, it's like sleeping without your blanket. You're gonna wake up a little chili without your blank eyes. All right. The next one doesn't have a neat little rhyme to it, So attempt something crickets a bit chirpen. The sun must be bourbon, Okay, I like it an Yeah, so crickets. It turns out chirp faster and warmer conditions,

and more slowly as the air turns more frigid. And this is particularly true in the species of campus full tony and uh you probably have you know you grew up in a rural area right as a youngster, as did I. And that's one of those features of nighttime, especially a summer. You hear that chirping, And it's kind of amazing to me that this isn't something that I knew as folklore. Yeah, me neither. Despite just yeah that that cacophony of insect noises that you deal with growing

up in a rural environment. So you're probably wondering, how can I calculate this air pressure because that's actually what they're reflecting here. Well, there's edition of the American Naturalists by A Dolbear who created this formula T equals fifty plus n minus four divided by four, where t equals

temperature f and n equals chirp rate per minute. And thankfully we have the Old Farmer's Almanac to help us convert cricket chirps to degrees fahrenheit by counting the number of chirps in fourteen seconds and then adding fort to get the temperature. Okay, that sounds a bit easier, right, So example, thirty chirps plus forty equals seventy degrees. So

why is this important? Well, because listening eve's dropping on the mating calls of crickets can actually give you an idea whether or not a warm front is coming or a cold fronts coming. But I gotta tell you it has its limitations because it's only accurate down to fifty five degrees fahrenheit. Uh. Any lower than that than the

crickets take off, they're not really interested in hanging out me. Yeah. Well, you mentioned the Farmer's Almanac there, and and I have I have to ask, like, what is the deal with the farm Farmers Alminate? Because it's one of those books that has always been in the background in my life. I think my grandfather had would have a copy setting around, and I may have like lead through it once or twice as a kid. And you see it, you know, pretty much in any bookstore you go to, that will

be Armer's Almanac there. And I really have no idea exactly what to do. I just always assumed it was just a whole bunch of old wives tales and a little you know, idioms and sayings about the weather. Look at the size of a wooly caterpillar to tell what the rain is going to do, that sort of thing. And I've never really paid it much attention beyond that. Yeah, I remember when I was a little it was usually

a fixture in my relatives bathrooms. Right, it was good bathroom reading, and it turns out that there are two different farmers almanacs. Okay, they're competing. There's the Farmers Almanac and the Old Farmers Almanac, founded in eighteen twelve and seventeen ninety two, respectively, and they both rely on proprietary formulas for their weather prognostications and how stuff works. Actually

has an article on this. Kate Kirshner wrote it, and she says, quote, the Farmer's Almanac uses mathematical and astronomical formulas which are passed along from one anonymous prognosticator to another, and this almanac formula is really just entrusted to what they say is one living being, a being, not not not a person, not a human, but a being. Yeah, okay, well that makes me think it might just be like a centaur or something. Right. Wouldn't that be wonderful if

it is a centaur and it is a living being? Right? Whatever? This living being is, this weather forecaster since the publication's inception has gone by the pseudonym Caleb weather Be And uh, they keep pretty mum about Caleb about who he or she is. They just confirmed that this person exists. That's

the only thing they'll confirm. Now, the Old Farmer's Almanac relies on a theory that weather is a result of magnetic storms on the sun surface, and the forecast a predicted based on a formula that is locked away in a black box at the headquarters. Wow, let's see, I had no idea it was this kind of secrety and could right. It feels masonic, right it does. Um. Now, both of the publications claim in accuracy rate when it comes to weather, but independent verifications looking at you know,

years of data, say it's more like a coin toss about. Okay. So they each have their own systems based in whatever is happening on the sun or some sort of secret methodology, and it just kind of lines up with what's actually happening to a degree that you can roll with. That's the idea, right, like you can there's fifty chance that their year out from now, um forecast is going to be correct. Plus like you'll get some sort of tip

about how to remove you know, butterbean stains or something. Okay, Yeah, you don't get that from your just iPhone weather app, you know, now you don't useful data. Siri will not tell you that information, all right, So there you have it just a little inside in the world of weather superstition, and how in some cases it does line up with what's actually going on in this complex chaotic system of the atmosphere. Um and I know, you know, let's let's call over the robot and have just a little bit

of listener mail. We got this from Betsy Lange, and she starts out by saying, I had a paradigm shift two years ago while listening to stuff to play her mind, a marathon of it at a rainy campground near Barcelona. My master's thesis was on endocrine disruptors, and I cowered in fear of all the things plastic, even fearing the

future of science and society. Your podcast, the first I ever listened to and still my favorite, woke me up and reminded me of the wonder and science, transforming me back into the optimists slash futurists that I forgot I was during those years of wiping butts. Just in parentheses, I was at home parent for six years, she says.

I'm writing to you because you've inspired me along with so many others, and I'm in the process of creating a related but very different audio program that I hope you and or some of your listens can get involved in my production is called Stamma Gora and it will use the voices of people around the world to have

a conversation about science and math topics. Contributors can submit short audio files on topics that intrigue them, interviews, monologues, debates, presentations, musical composition, and she said they don't need professional equipment. She said she wants more of a grassroots sound. So the first phase of this project is underway and a few guys are interested in it. Make sure you go to ww dot quilla dot info that's q U I l l A dot info because she is accepting audio

entries until June UM. So if you guys are interested in that looks like a really cool project, do check it out. Indeed, that sounds really fascinating. In the meantime, if you want to check out more of what we do here, head on over to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That's where you'll find all of our guest episodes, videos, blog post links out to social media

accounts you name it, and hete for. On the landing page for this episode, we'll make sure we include some links to some related contents, such as that Farmers Albanach article on how stuff works, as well as an article on whether from how stuff works dot com. And if you have some thoughts about these superstitions, if you get a little wrestling in your bonnes when it starts to rain out, let us know. You can drop us a line by emailing us below the mind at how stuff

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