The document provides a history of the development of meteorological instruments from ancient times to modern day. It describes how early Greek and Roman scholars like Aristotle and Pomponius Mela made contributions to the study of weather. Basic weather instruments like the hygrometer, thermometer, and barometer were invented and refined over centuries by scientists including Galileo, Torricelli, Fahrenheit, and Celsius. The cup anemometer for measuring wind speed was a key development in the 19th century. Modern meteorology incorporates these early measurement tools with new technologies.
2. In 350 BC, Aristotle wrote Meteorology. Aristotle is considered the founder of meteorology.Oneof the most impressive achievements described in the Meteorology is the description of what is now known as the hydrologic cycle. The Greek scientist Theophrastus compiled a book on weather forecasting, called the Book of Signs. The work of Theophrastus remained a dominant influence in the study of weather and in weather forecasting for nearly 2,000 years.In25 AD, PomponiusMela, a geographer for the Roman Empire, formalized the climatic zone system. Around the 9th century, Al-Dinawari, a Kurdish naturalist, writes the Kitab al-Nabat (Book of Plants), in which he deals with the application of meteorology to agriculture during the Muslim Agricultural Revolution. He describes the meteorological character of the sky, the planets and constellations, the sun and moon, the lunar phases indicating seasons and rain, the anwa (heavenly bodies of rain), and atmospheric phenomena such as winds, thunder, lightning, snow, floods, valleys, rivers, lakes, wells and other sources of water. ….History of meteorology
3. Meteorology is the interdisciplinary scientific study of the atmosphere that focuses on weather processes and short term forecasting (in contrast with climatology). Studies in the field stretch back millennia, though significant progress in meteorology did not occur until the eighteenth century. The nineteenth century saw breakthroughs occur after observing networks developed across several countries. Breakthroughs in weather forecasting were achieved in the latter half of the twentieth century, after the development of the computer.
4. Meteorological phenomena are observable weather events which illuminate and are explained by the science of meteorology. Those events are bound by the variables that exist in Earth's atmosphere: They are temperature, air pressure, water vapor, and the gradients and interactions of each variable, and how they change in time. The majority of Earth's observed weather is located in the troposphere.[1][2] Different spatial scales are studied to determine how systems on local, region, and global levels impact weather and climatology. Meteorology, climatology, atmospheric physics, and atmospheric chemistry are sub-disciplines of the atmospheric sciences. Meteorology and hydrology compose the interdisciplinary field of hydrometeorology. Interactions between Earth's atmosphere and the oceans are part of coupled ocean-atmosphere studies. Meteorology has application in many diverse fields such as the military, energy production, transport, agriculture and construction.
6. Weather instruments have a long, rich history that may be charted against the growth of science itself. The advent of weather instruments was a time when inventors could be experts in many scientific fields---Galileo, for example, helped lay down the framework for modern astronomy but also found the time to experiment with thermometers. Starting with a mere idea, the design of these specialized instruments graduated to robust theory, experimental application and progressive refinement over time.
7. Hygrometers One of the first known designs of the hygrometer was written down in approximately 1450 AD by Nicholas of Cues, who described how to measure the humidity of air. An early hygrometer was built by Leonardo da Vinci and later in 1663 by Robert Hooke, using a piece of hair that contracted or expanded depending on the degree of humidity present. Inventions in 1783 by Horace-Bénédict de Saussure (who used human hair) and in 1820 (when J. F. Daniell used ether in glass tubes) refined the hygrometer.
8. Thermometers Thermometers were progressively developed over time by inventors such as Cornelius Drebbel, Robert Fludd, SantorioSantorio and, most notably, Galileo Galilei, who in 1592 invented a thermoscope that reacted to changes in temperatures. In 1612, Santorio put a scale on the thermometer so that it began to resemble its more modern permutations, but it wasn't until 1714 that Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit replaced the alcohol in thermometers with mercury and developed a more accurate measurement, later to be followed by Anders Celsius and Sir William Thomson (who invented the Kelvin scale) with their own measurements of temperature.
9. Barometers Evangelista Torricelli is credited with inventing the barometer in 1643 to measure air pressure, but both Giovanni Battista Baliani in 1630 and René Descartes in 1631 had postulated a version of the barometer even earlier than that. GasperoBerti, who had heard from Galileo about the design written down by Baliani, attempted to experiment with water in a vacuum between 1639 and 1641 to explain why pumps would not draw water above a certain height. Torricelli, however, approached it from a different angle and recognized that air had weight; he also recognized that mercury in a barometer was a suitable replacement for water. Years later, Blaise Pascal and Florin Périer refined the design.
10. Anemometers Anemometers, which measure wind speed, were first described by Leon Battista Alberti in 1450, but the most familiar kind, the cup anemometer, was invented in 1846 by Dr. John Thomas Romney Robinson. The design was refined up until the 20th century: In the 1960s and 1970s, anemometers that used lasers or sonar to measure wind speed were developed.
