Before smartphones and the National Weather Service, there was Grandma’s Knee

I thought my grandmother was psychic. One day in the mid-90s, in Richmond, Virginia, where I grew up, the temperature had risen above 100 degrees, as it often does during the height of summer. Everything seemed to melt that day under the oppressive heat. My grandmother looked down and began to massage her knees vigorously, like a fortune teller rubbing a crystal ball. She stared at me and said, “It’s going to storm.”

She was right.

I later learned that my grandmother was not psychic. Instead, she used the pain in her joints to predict rain, a phenomenon that has been widely studied, with unclear results. Before humans became dependent on technology, we used our senses — including observing animal behavior and cloud shapes — to help predict the weather.

Over time, those observations were stitched together and formed a history, said Mark Wysocki, a state climatologist for New York and a professor of meteorology at Cornell University. “People started passing these things down orally or, as civilization started to evolve more, people started writing these things down,” he said.

Sandi Duncan, editor-in-chief of Farmers’ Almanac, talks about the weather is still regularly discussedlikened the passing of weather knowledge over time to a game of phone, adding that some of it may have changed to rhyme.

Human survival, especially that of sailors and fishermen, has traditionally been largely dependent on the weather. One of the most recognizable anecdotes, “Mackerel clouds in the sky, expect more wet than dry,” can be traced back to sailors at least a few hundred years.

“There was no communication at sea then, there was no mobile phone,” Mr Wysocki said. “So the sailors had to rely on the air conditions, the wind direction, the waves.” Ship captains recorded their sightings in logs, which were shared.

The science behind the phrase holds up. Clouds that resemble the scales of a mackerel are called altocumulus clouds and form in advance of an approaching, large storm, Mr Wysocki said. “If you saw something like that coming, it’s kind of a warning that we have an unstable atmosphere,” he said.

Weather knowledge related to sky color and cloud shapes can be explained by science, Mr Wysocki said. “Red sky at night, sailor’s delight; red sky in the morning, sailor’s warning’, is generally true. When a red sky is observed at sunset, sunlight passes through a high concentration of dust particles, typically a sign of high pressure and stable air coming in from the west, according to the Library of Congress. When a sunrise is red in color, it means that fair weather has already passed, indicating that a potential storm may be coming.

Anecdotes based on birds, insects, and other animal species are often less scientific and can be misleading.

In the Midwest and Northeast, the woolly bear caterpillar is sometimes used to predict the severity of a coming winter. According to weather lore, the longer the caterpillar’s black bands, the harsher the winter will be; the opposite is predicted if the middle brown band is wider. The National Weather Service debunk this myth. The colors on a woolly bear caterpillar are directly related to how long it has been feeding, its age and species. Similarly, attempts to use groundhogs in early February to predict another six weeks of winter or an early spring have been debunked.

“Squirrels gathering nuts in a fit will cause the snow to gather quickly” is another popular rebuttal, but Mr Wyscoki said it’s incorrect: conditions may have just been optimal for oaks to produce more acorns, making it looks like squirrels are gathering more. “People see it once, and they don’t go back and check 20, 40 times,” he said of the apparently related phenomena. “You need multiple experiments, multiple observations to make this thing work.”

Farmers once also relied on these sayings, some of which were printed in almanacs. “When we started the Farmers’ Almanac in 1818, we offered weather forecasts, but they were much more general than they are now,” said Mrs. Duncan.

The transition from winter to spring regularly causes severe weather in large parts of the United States. In early March, a series of powerful storms killed at least 12 people in Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, Mississippi and Tennessee.

“I think we’re heading into a fairly active severe weather season,” said John Sirlin, a storm chaser for more than 30 years.

Mr. Sirlin, 47, lives in Arizona and prefers to chase storms in the Northern High Plains. He is familiar with meteorology and regularly uses basic observations, along with technology, to predict weather behavior.

“There are so many different things you can learn about the weather just by using your senses,” he said, including paying attention to wind direction and noticing the changing shapes of clouds, which can reveal the stability of the atmosphere.

But that information must be read correctly to assess potential hazards such as hail and tornadoes, or, in the case of my grandmother and her aching joints, thunder.

“What’s really cool about the vibe is that it gives you clues and signals about all these different things if you learn to pick them up and interpret them correctly,” he said.

This spring, he and storm chasers fanned out across the United States in anticipation of severe weather. Mr. Sirlin has “a lifelong passion and obsession with the weather”, noting that he is always learning.

“Thirty years later, every time I go out, I always learn something new and pick up something different.”