Future Weather

This chapter draws on empirical research from an AHRC-funded project entitled Spaces of Experience and Horizons of Expectation: Extreme Weather in the UK, Past, Present and Future, to illustrate the complex historical geographies and politics of ‘weather wising’ and different forms of weather prognostications. Endfield considers the different ways in which particular historical subjects imagined and articulated knowledge about weather futures and examines the different temporalities implicated within such practices: from anxieties over immediate weather futures expressed in daily agricultural diaries to longer-term annual forecasting associated with annual almanacs. Uncovering a range of tools and technologies involved in weather forecasting—including both human and non-human methods of forecasting, phenological observations, and prognostications associated with animal behaviours—Endfield explores questions of credibility, authority, and status in terms of knowing and articulating understanding of future weather.