METEOROLOGY

Ibn al-Haytham atmospheric refraction

horizonEarth's atmosphere

atmosphereobservations Sun

St. Albert the Great

Roger Bacon

Theodoric of Freiberg Kamāl al-Dīn al-Fārisī

rainbowaurorae

Earth's magnetic field

Instruments and classification scales

• In 1441, King Sejongs son, Prince Munjong, invented the first standardized rain gauge.These were sent throughout the Joseon Dynasty of Korea as an official tool to assess land taxes based upon a farmer's potential harvest. In 1450, Leone Battista Alberti developed a swinging-plate anemometer, and is known as the first anemometer. In 1607, Galileo Galilei constructs a thermoscope. In 1611, Johannes Kepler writes the first scientific treatise on snow crystals: "Strena Seu de NiveSexangula (A New Year's Gift of Hexagonal Snow)". In 1643, Evangelista Torricelliinvents the mercury barometer. In 1662, Sir Christopher Wren invented the mechanical, self-emptying, tipping bucket rain gauge. In 1714, Gabriel Fahrenheitcreates a reliable scale for measuring temperature with a mercury-type thermometer. In 1742, Anders Celsius, a Swedish astronomer, proposed the 'centigrade' temperature scale, the predecessor of the current Celsius scale. In 1783, the first hair hygrometer is demonstrated by Horace-Bénédict de Saussure. In 1802-1803, Luke Howard writes On the Modification of Clouds in which he assigns cloud types Latin names. In 1806, Francis Beaufort introduced his system for classifying wind speeds. Near the end of the 19th century the first cloud atlaseswere published, including the International Cloud Atlas, which has remained in print ever since. The April 1960 launch of the first successful weather satellite, TIROS-1, marked the beginning of the age where weather information became available globally.

Research into cyclones and air flow