Q1.
How do they do it? Do they just look up at the sky and guess?
Answer
No — they do not guess. Meteorology is the systematic study of the weather and how it changes, and it is the basis of all forecasting.
Meteorologists work in three steps:
- Measure. Instruments at weather stations record temperature, rainfall, pressure, wind and humidity at fixed times every day.
- Collect over time. The readings are gathered from hundreds of stations over months and years, so that patterns can be seen — this is what the chapter calls statistics, the technique of gathering and analysing data to detect patterns, understand events and make predictions.
- Predict. Scientific methods are applied to that data to say how the weather in a region will behave in a few hours, a few days, or even a few weeks.
Tip: Looking at the sky is still part of the job — a sudden dark bank of cloud is real evidence. But an eye can only see the sky above one place at one moment. Instruments see the whole country, day and night, and remember what they saw.