Weather Folklore - Where Weather Happens

Where Weather Happens

It is in Earth's middle latitudes, between roughly 30° to 60° North and South, that a significant portion of humanity's daily activities take place. It is also within these rough boundaries that "weather" can be said to happen, that is, where meteorological phenomena do not persist over the long term, and where it may be warm, sunny, and calm one day, and cold and stormy the next.

A great percentage of the world's population lives in the equatorial regions, but for the most part, these regions do not experience weather as it is understood by this definition. The Sahara Desert, for instance, is almost uniformly hot and dry, whereas weather trends on the Indian subcontinent and in the western Pacific, for instance, the monsoonal belt, occur gradually over the very long term, and the diurnal weather patterns remain constant.

Weather folklore, therefore, refers to this mid-latitude region of daily variability. While most of it applies equally to the Southern Hemisphere, the Southern Hemisphere resident may need to take into account the fact that weather systems rotate opposite to those in the North. For instance, the "crossed winds" rule (see below) must be reversed for the Australian reader.