How Writing Advanced Weather Forecasting

In case you haven’t heard, a good portion of the United States was hit by a snowstorm followed by freezing rain. I spent Monday breaking up ice and then shoveling it off the sidewalk and my front steps. Plus, I basically used four-wheel drive for the first time, which is kind of ironic given the fact that I grew up in a town that had to launch an annual wagon train through the Cherokee and Nantahala National Forests in 1958 to advocate for a highway connecting Tennessee and North Carolina.  

Fortunately, I had time to prepare. Media and federal, state, and local government reports warned us all well in advance of this storm and told us what to expect with each passing hour. Weather forecasting is more advanced today than ever before and that is due in part to the written word.

The first document to describe weather patterns was Aristotle’s Meteorologica, which was written around 340 B.C. and consists of three books on meteorology and one on chemistry. While the text was ancient, it served as the foundation for weather forecasting until the 1600s.

Scientific advances improved meteorology, and then the invention of the electronic telegraph made it possible to transmit weather patterns across the country almost instantaneousl,y starting in the 1840s. The first daily weather forecasts were published in London’s The Times in 1861, and they are now part of every major newspaper and news broadcast.

Today, we have numerous ways to get weather reports, including just checking an app on our smartphone. That being said, predictions can still be wrong. Here is a hilarious, NSFW clip of Larry David confronting a meteorologist who made a mistake on Curb Your Enthusiasm.  

If you enjoyed this piece, you might also like my earlier blog on Understanding Both sides for your writing.

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