There were no instruments to predict the weather in ancient times. How do they predict the weather?

Although there were no instruments to predict the weather in ancient times, they also had their own methods to predict the weather.

After all, food is the most important thing for the people. If you want to produce food, you must carry out agricultural production. And agricultural production depends on the weather, you have to know the weather. So at a very early age, the ancients began their journey of weather forecast. In these thousands of years, they have also summed up many unique weather forecasting methods. Even without weather forecasting instruments, they can forecast the weather according to their experience and some related knowledge.

During the Xia and Shang Dynasties, ancient people began to engage in agricultural production. At that time, there were no meteorological instruments, and people made weather forecasts by observing the sky and divining, although the accuracy of the forecast was not so high compared with the current technology. At that time, there was a kind of people called fortune tellers. They could look at the stars at night, get a lot of things from the stars that ordinary people could not see, and to some extent, they could "predict the future". Although fortune-tellers sound mysterious, if we go deep into them, we actually find that they only make some reasonable speculations within a certain range based on some related knowledge such as Yin-Yang and Five Elements, which still has certain credibility.

The ancients accumulated a lot of experience by observing the sky and divination, including 24 solar terms and some weather proverbs. The first is to understand the weather by observing the clouds. The simplest thing is that the clouds are gathering, which means it will definitely rain. If there are fish scales in the sky, it means sunny and so on. The second is to know the weather by looking at the wind. "East wind rains and west wind is fine" means that winds in different directions are cold, warm, dry and wet, which will bring different weather. In addition, the weather is predicted according to animal activities. For example, it's going to rain, dragonflies will fly low, frogs will sing, earthworms will come out of holes, or there are water droplets on the spider web in the morning, which means it must be sunny today.

The ancients summed up many methods and experiences of forecasting weather through their own wisdom, many of which are still of reference value even today.