In the days before weather apps (which when you think about it covers most days), and even before television meteorologists, people had to get their weather forecasts by observation and experience. Having a good read on the weather was especially important for farmers, sailors, pilots and anyone else whose lives or livelihood depended on knowing what the weather was likely to do, says Sonia Lasher-Trapp, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. “Long before there were computers or forecasting models, people gazed at the sky all the time. They could tell if fronts were going to be passing through by the patterns in the clouds. When they looked at the sky, it wasn’t just an indication of what was happening right then, but could be an indication of what was going to happen.”
Unsurprisingly, back in the day, people used plenty of rules of thumb for predicting the weather. Today we think of these as “old wives’ tales,” or if we’re being charitable, “weather lore.” Some of those old guides, though, were surprisingly reliable. Here are a few that actually have some basis in science — and a few that don’t.
