Timeline of Meteorology - Antiquity

Antiquity

• 3000 BC - The beginnings of meteorology can be traced back in India to 3000 B.C.E, such as the Upanishads, contain serious discussion about the processes of cloud formation and rain and the seasonal cycles caused by the movement of earth round the sun.
• 600 BC - Thales may qualify as the first Greek meteorologist. He described the water cycle in a fairly accurate way. He also issued the first seasonal crop forecast.

• 400 BC - There is some evidence that Democritus predicted changes in the weather, and that he used this ability to convince people that he could predict other future events.

• 400 BC - Hippocrates writes a treatise called Airs, Waters and Places, the earliest known work to include a discussion of weather. More generally, he wrote about common diseases that occur in particular locations, seasons, winds and air.

• 350 BC - Aristotle writes Meteorology.

Although the term meteorology is used today to describe a subdiscipline of the atmospheric sciences, Aristotle's work is more general. The work touches upon much of what is known as the earth sciences. In his own words:

...all the affections we may call common to air and water, and the kinds and parts of the earth and the affections of its parts.

One of the most impressive achievements in Meteorology is his description of what is now known as the hydrologic cycle:

Now the sun, moving as it does, sets up processes of change and becoming and decay, and by its agency the finest and sweetest water is every day carried up and is dissolved into vapour and rises to the upper region, where it is condensed again by the cold and so returns to the earth.

• 250 BC - Archimedes studies the concepts of buoyancy and the hydrostatic principle. Positive buoyancy is necessary for the formation of convective clouds (cumulus, cumulus congestus and cumulonimbus).

• 25 AD - Pomponius Mela, a geographer for the Roman empire, formalizes the climatic zone system.

• c. 80 AD - In his Lunheng (論衡; Critical Essays), the Han Dynasty Chinese philosopher Wang Chong (27-97 AD) dispels the Chinese myth of rain coming from the heavens, and states that rain is evaporated from water on the earth into the air and forms clouds, stating that clouds condense into rain and also form dew, and says when the clothes of people in high mountains are moistened, this is because of the air-suspended rain water. However, Wang Chong supports his theory by quoting a similar one of Gongyang Gao's, the latter's commentary on the Spring and Autumn Annals, the Gongyang Zhuan, compiled in the 2nd century BC, showing that the Chinese conception of rain evaporating and rising to form clouds goes back much farther than Wang Chong. Wang Chong wrote:

As to this coming of rain from the mountains, some hold that the clouds carry the rain with them, dispersing as it is precipitated (and they are right). Clouds and rain are really the same thing. Water evaporating upwards becomes clouds, which condense into rain, or still further into dew.