Almost every day you might check the weather forecast to see what the temperature will be like or if it might rain.

But when you hear a forecast, how exactly do they know what the temperature is going to be or if it's going to rain?

Also, how accurate our weather forecasts and how accurate could they even possibly be.

Learn more about weather forecasting, its history, and how it works, on this episode of

Everything Everywhere Daily. everywhere daily. I've done several episodes on the subject of measurement. In particular I've talked

about the measurement of time, length, and mass.

All of these are pretty straightforward.

Time has natural units like days and years that we use.

Length and mass are just a matter of selecting arbitrary units and using them as a standard.

But temperature is something else entirely.

The only natural point that humans can really use as a reference is the freezing point of water at

standard pressure. Beyond that, there is no intuitive way to measure temperature.

Without a special tool you can't really quantify what the temperature is

unlike length, mass, or time. Understanding how weather works took a long time to develop. For the longest

time all we knew about the weather was what we could experience in our immediate surroundings.

The first attempts at formal weather prediction began with the ancient Babylonians.

They attempted to predict the weather based on cloud patterns and astrology, which made their predictions

more akin to clairvoyance than science.

The Greek philosopher Aristotle wrote a book called Meteorologica where he set out his theories of how the weather and the natural world worked.

Unfortunately, pretty much everything he said was wrong. For example, he didn't believe that the wind was moving air.

The problem wasn't so much that Aristotle was wrong.

He was writing over 2,000 years ago when there was no real systematic way of doing science. The problem was that the words of

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