Which Weather Actually Lives in You?
Weather makes a useful language for describing people because everyone already speaks it. We say someone is sunny, or that a mood has blown over, or that the atmosphere in a room went heavy about an hour before anything was actually said.
So here are seven questions written in that language, and a forecast at the end rather than a label. Below the quiz is the real thing: the pharmacist who named the clouds, a wind scale you can read without a single instrument, and the chemistry behind the smell of rain on a hot pavement.
See all the outcomes this quiz can land on, and what each one means →
Luke Howard gave the clouds their Latin
Before 1802 clouds had local names and no system. Luke Howard, a London pharmacist and amateur meteorologist, read a paper to the Askesian Society proposing three basic forms with Latin names anyone could use: cirrus for the fibrous ones, cumulus for heaped, stratus for layered, with nimbus for rain-bearing. Crucially he allowed them to combine and change into one another, which is what made the scheme survive.
It was popular well beyond science. Goethe wrote verses in Howard's honour, and John Constable spent 1821 and 1822 on Hampstead Heath making oil sketches of sky, several annotated on the back with the date, time and wind direction. Howard's terms still sit at the centre of the World Meteorological Organization's International Cloud Atlas, whose 2017 edition added new classifications including asperitas and volutus.
A scale you can read without a single instrument
Francis Beaufort's wind scale, drawn up in 1805, made no reference to speed. It described what a fully rigged warship could carry in sail at each force, and was later restated in terms anyone on land can check: leaves rustle at force two, umbrellas become difficult at six, twigs break off trees at eight. The Royal Navy adopted it formally in 1838.
The same instinct produced the shipping forecast, which grew out of the gale warnings Robert FitzRoy began issuing in 1861 and has been broadcast on British radio since 1924. It is written to a tight word limit in a fixed order of sea areas, which is why it scans like poetry to people who have never owned a boat.
Petrichor, and the limits of the metaphor
The smell of rain on dry ground was named in 1964 by two Australian scientists, Isabel Bear and Richard Thomas, in a paper for Nature. They coined petrichor from the Greek for stone and for the fluid in the veins of the gods. Much of it comes from geosmin, made by soil bacteria of the genus Streptomyces, which the human nose detects at a few parts per trillion, far more sensitively than sharks smell blood.
A 2015 study at MIT filmed the mechanism at high speed: raindrops landing on porous ground trap tiny air bubbles that fizz upward and fling scent-carrying aerosols into the air. That is why a light shower smells stronger than a downpour.
As for weather and people, researchers matching daily mood diaries against local weather records have generally found small average effects with very large differences between individuals, so a personal forecast is a figure of speech and nothing more. This quiz reads your answers, not your atmosphere.
