"Climate is what we expect. Weather is what we get." (Usually attributed to Mark Twain but may have been from a 1901 textbook, Outlines of Physiography.)
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When I was a teenager my family had a small cabin on the west side of Hood Canal in Washington state about 10 miles from the opening into Admiralty inlet. Hood canal is really a fjord, running from the Southwest for about 50 miles, to the Northeast. We had two boats at the cabin, an 8 foot rowboat and a 14 foot outboard. We used them mainly for fishing. Storms traveled the distance of the waterway from SW to NE. Because the waterway was narrow and fairly straight for many miles, it was a good place to learn about weather because you could see it coming long before it got to you.
We liked to fish at a small horseshoe shaped cove about 3 miles south of the cabin, where the salmon ran off the point on the north side of the cove. Storms and rain could be seen approaching long before they were a danger to us. By keeping one eye on the fishing, and the other on the weather, if it was obviously changing, we could turn and run home before the front reached us.
In ancient times, and up to the 20th century, the individual art of being able to predict the weather, was extremely important to sailors. Sailors took great pride in being able to predict what was happening using signs such as clouds, the direction of the wind, the direction of the waves, the behavior of birds, and other natural phenomenon. The only instrument sailors had was a barometer and you had to know how to interpret what the barometer was showing. More often than not, this could mean the difference between life and death. Many ships were lost at sea because mariners did not have long range forecasts. In the twentieth century and now in the 21st we still see people (mostly recreational boaters) setting off on a voyage and getting in serious trouble because they did not check weather forecasts before setting out, and they didn’t know how to recognize serious changes in the weather until it was too late.
When ships began to be equipped with radios, sailors began to have earlier warnings about weather. Probably the most famous daily weather forecast is the Shipping Forecast by the BBC which has been broadcast regularly for about 150 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shipping_Forecast In fact, in England it has becomes somewhat of a daily ritual to listen to the shipping forecast before you go to bed for the night.
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