To meteorologists, rain and snow are technically meteors, a usage from 1563
When meteorology first entered English in 1563, a writer named William Fulke used meteors to mean shooting stars, rain, snow, clouds and even earthquakes. Weather scientists still call any atmospheric phenomenon a meteor. For nearly two thousand years, forecasting rested on Aristotle and his student's folk rules, like a rolling dog meaning a storm.
Meteorology is the science of the atmosphere and short-term weather, with forecasting at its core. Its name comes from the Greek for things high in the air. Its practical reach is wide, from aviation and shipping to agriculture, energy and disaster warnings, and today forecasters combine thermometers and barometers with satellites, radar, balloons, buoys and reconnaissance aircraft.
Early weather prediction mixed observation with ritual. Egyptians performed rain-making ceremonies around 3500 BC, and Babylonian tablets linked thunder with rain. The Greeks were first to theorise. Anaxagoras noticed that air cools with height and that heat lifts clouds, and reasoned that summer hail forms when moisture is carried high enough to freeze. Aristotle's Meteorology, written in 350 BC, described what we now call the water cycle and held authority for almost 2,000 years. His successor Theophrastus compiled a Book of Signs listing hundreds of omens, with rules such as a wet winter usually bringing a dry spring, and it dominated forecasting just as long.
Progress then stalled. Roman writers such as Seneca and Pliny mostly preserved earlier Greek ideas, and Bede, the first Englishman to write about weather, produced his summary of classical sources in 703. Much of Aristotle's meteorological work was lost in Europe until the twelfth century, reaching the West partly through Arabic translations. In the ninth century Al-Dinawari applied weather knowledge to farming in his Book of Plants.
The modern field took shape later. Alhazen and Descartes challenged Aristotle, reliable barometers and thermometers arrived in the eighteenth century alongside the first meteorological society, and telegraph networks in the nineteenth allowed observations to be pooled across regions. Numerical weather prediction, satellites and computers transformed forecasting in the twentieth century. Machine learning and ensemble methods now sharpen it, though the chaotic atmosphere, the butterfly effect, still guarantees some uncertainty.
Source: Meteorology
