



































The Weather Watchers: Amateur Climatologists and Environmental Consciousness, 1810-20


 History of Meteorology 7 (2015) 14 

 
 

 14 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Weather Watchers: Amateur Climatologists and 

Environmental Consciousness, 1810-20 
 

Sean Munger 

mmunger@uoregon.edu 

University of Oregon 

 

In the early nineteenth century, enthusiastic observers of weather phenomena, armed with freely-

available meteorological instruments like thermometers, barometers and wind gauges, kept 

detailed and systematic records of weather conditions in various locations. These observers—

who I term “weather watchers”—neither identified themselves as professional scientists nor were 

generally regarded as such by peers, yet they searched for broad patterns in their data and used it 

to construct scientific-sounding theories about how they thought weather and climate worked. 

The theories themselves were unpersuasive and bordered on the fanciful, but they did exemplify 

an interesting conception of the environment as existing in two interrelated layers with vastly 

different scope and construction. This dual-layered environmental consciousness becomes 

especially clear during the second decade of the nineteenth century, a period of temporary global 

climate change driven by a series of volcanic eruptions. Public fascination with the weather and 

climate events of this “Cold Decade” were both a motivating factor for the weather watchers’ 

search for predictive patterns and also provided them a unique opportunity to address a largely 

unfilled demand for meteorological information in the press. This paper will explore these 

dimensions of the weather watchers and their thinking by profiling three particular examples 

from the United States and Britain: Thomas Jefferson, George Mackenzie and Luke Howard. In 

doing so, students of the history of meteorology and climatology may appreciate the usefulness 

of the Cold Decade as a lens to bring into clearer focus the environmental thinking of the era.  

In February or March 1809, a large volcanic eruption deposited matching layers of 

volcanic fallout—principally sulfur dioxide, SO2—on the ice sheets of both Greenland and 

Antarctica, which was discovered in ice cores taken two centuries later. Exactly which mountain 

erupted in 1809 is unknown, but only an eruption of considerable magnitude, and one occurring 

in the tropics, can account for the fallout observed at both poles.
1
 Six years later an even greater 

volcanic event, the April 1815 blast of Mt. Tambora in the East Indies, filled the Earth’s 

stratosphere with so much SO2 that the resulting series of weather anomalies marked 1816 in 

                                                 
1
 Jihong Cole-Dai, David Ferris, Alyson Lanciki, Joël Savarino, Mélanie Baroni, Mark H. Thiemens, “Cold Decade 

(AD 1810-1819) Caused by Tambora (1815) and Another (1809) Stratospheric Volcanic Eruption, Geophysical 

Research Letters, Vol. 36, L22703 (2009), 1-2, 5. 

mailto:mmunger@uoregon.edu


 History of Meteorology 7 (2015) 15 

 
 

 15 

Europe and America as the “Year Without Summer.”
2
 Yet as well-known as the 1816 anomalies 

are, the entire decade of the 1810s was characterized by significantly below-average 

temperatures worldwide; Mountain X and Tambora acted in tandem to plunge the world into a 

“Cold Decade” unmatched in meteorological history for the past 500 years.
3
 

Observers and recorders of weather phenomena have been the subject of significant 

historical studies, often relating to how observers affected the development of the scientific 

disciplines of meteorology and climatology, or particular institutions related to weather study. 

The term “weather watchers” or “storm watchers” is often applied to such observers, whether or 

not they self-identified as scientific or meteorological professionals.
4
 My use of the term 

“weather watchers” in this paper is generally evocative of these approaches, with a few 

important boundaries. What I term weather watchers are people defined largely by what they 

did—observe and record the weather for a significant period of time and in some systematic 

fashion, however imperfectly—and not by the status they held or how they were viewed by 

others. In the 1810s, an era before most of the institutionalization and specialization of science as 

we know it today developed, attempts to demarcate amateurs from professionals are largely 

arbitrary. Although the competence and usefulness of weather watchers to meteorology as a 

whole was hotly debated in the period, for example in Britain’s Royal Society,
5
 for purposes of 

my analysis the activity of weather observation and recording is significant because those who 

did it believed they were doing something useful or even revolutionary for science,
6
 whether or 

not contemporaries or historians agreed with them. 

The weather watchers of the 1810s were part of a long tradition. Observers and recorders 

of weather phenomena were quite active, for example, in Britain and on the continent from the 

middle of the 17th century and through the Enlightenment era. Many of the Enlightenment-era 

weather watchers, however—like John Locke or Petrus van Musschenbroek—tended to be 

natural philosophers who sought weather data specifically as a means to illustrate the functioning 

of broader natural laws.
7
 The Cold Decade was different in two respects relevant to the context 

in which weather watchers operated. First, meteorology was in a transitional phase in the 1810s, 

moving from the traditional qualitative and descriptive approach of the Early Modern period 

toward a new emphasis, first advocated by science writers at the end of the 18th century, on 

quantitative measurement and the understanding of empirical data.
8
 The weather watchers of this 

period were thus less inclined to use their data to validate philosophical notions about the 

universe, and more inclined to do the reverse: that is, to develop theories for the purpose of 

proving the significance of their data. Secondly, the anomalies of the Cold Decade coincided 

                                                 
2
 Michael Rampino, Stephen Self & Richard B. Stothers, “Volcanic Winters,” Ann. Rev. Earth Planet. Sci. 16 

(1988): 73-99 
3
 Cole-Dai, “Cold Decade,” 5. 

4
 See, e.g., John D. Cox, Storm Watchers: The Turbulent History of Weather Prediction from Franklin’s Kite to El 

Niño (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2002); David Day, The Weather Watchers: 100 Years of the Bureau of 

Meteorology (Melbourne: Melbourne University Publishing, 2007).  
5
 Vladimir Janković, Reading the Skies: A Cultural History of English Weather 1650-1820 (Chicago: University of 

Chicago Press, 2000), 161-62. 
6
 See, e.g., the summations of Thomas Jefferson in his “Weather Book” and George Mackenzie’s reckoning of his 

own importance to the history of science, discussed below. 
7
 Lorraine Daston, “Unruly Weather: Natural Law Confronts Natural Variability,” in Natural Law and the Laws of 

Early Modern Europe, ed. Lorraine Daston and Michael Stolleis (Burlington: Ashgate, 2008), 233, 237-40. 
8
 Janković, Reading the Skies, 158-64. 



 History of Meteorology 7 (2015) 16 

 
 

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with an increased public demand for better understanding of meteorological phenomena, as will 

be discussed below. 

The case studies I will present here exemplify how these weather watchers in the United 

States and Britain viewed the physical environment of the atmosphere, the heavens and the local 

world around them. The three men profiled here approached their activities from different 

backgrounds but they had significant commonalities. All were white and of generally high 

socioeconomic status. Though not strictly urban none were strangers to cities, yet most of their 

measurements were taken in the countryside. The basis of their meteorological knowledge 

stemmed not from devoted scientific study but from personal observation and experience rooted 

in their daily lives, similar to the post-World War II amateur meteorologists of Britain discussed 

in Alexander Hall’s work.
9
 Each of these weather watchers possessed most or all of the usual 

weapons from the meteorologist’s arsenal: thermometer, barometer, rain gauge and clock. 

Although these weather watchers’ environmental consciousness was shared by many people 

across American and English society, what distinguished a true weather watcher from the rest of 

the population was his diligence in keeping empirical weather observations and fashioning some 

theoretical argument from his data, or in Jefferson’s case positing the data as the potential raw 

materials from which theory could be derived. Furthermore, each of Jefferson, Mackenzie and 

Howard were especially active during the Cold Decade and left behind uniquely colorful 

documentary records. 

 

Case Study: Thomas Jefferson and his “Weather Book” 
 

Early in his Presidency, on November 1, 1802, Thomas Jefferson began recording daily weather 

conditions in a small diary that has become known by archivists as his “weather book.” He 

typically took readings from a household thermometer at sunrise and again at three o’clock in the 

afternoon, to which he added notations of the direction of the wind and often a short statement of 

the weather. Frequently he also recorded agricultural and horticultural events such as the 

blossoming of flowers or, quite particularly, the days of the year on which particular 

commodities became available. He wrote down in his weather book nearly every weather event 

that had a significant effect on his crops or garden yields, such as frosts, unusual rains or drought 

conditions. He continued to record data in the weather book for the next 14 years.
10

 There were 

no pensions for public officeholders at this time, and after 1809 Jefferson’s sole means of 

income—hampered by insurmountable debt incurred during and even before his period of public 

service—came from the produce of his farms.
11

 Taken as a whole, his weather book crystallized 

into a record not only of the environmental history of his farms, but also an economic one. 

Jefferson had the misfortune to return home just as the decade-long upheavals in the 

world’s climate began. His weather book soon grew to contain notes on abnormally cool 

summers, the New Madrid earthquakes in 1811-12, a calamitous drought in 1813 that Jefferson 

judged the worst since 1755, and the unseasonable cold, killing frosts and cold snaps of the Year 

Without Summer. That year, 1816, was significant for Jefferson. He made the final daily entry in 

his weather book on December 31, 1816. Following this final entry he attempted to analyze and 

synthesize the data he had collected. He drew a table of the average number of days in each 

                                                 
9
 See Alexander Hall’s paper in this issue. 

10
 Thomas Jefferson, “Weather, 1802-1816,” Massachusetts Historical Society, passim. 

11
 Andrew Burstein and Nancy Isenberg, Madison and Jefferson (New York: Random House, 2010), 430; Barbara 

McEwan, Thomas Jefferson: Farmer (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 1991), 42. 



 History of Meteorology 7 (2015) 17 

 
 

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month in which particular winds prevailed, spanning 3,905 observations between January 1810 

and December 1816. Another table, derived from his fastidious attention to his rain gauge, 

reported mathematical averages of the frequency of rainy days and the tallies of cloudy versus 

“what astronomers call observing days in the week” for the purposes of watching celestial 

events.
12

 

Jefferson’s weather watching activities were aimed at more than simply the generation of 

knowledge for knowledge’s sake. They served a specific purpose. In his summation he wrote: 
 

It is a common opinion that the climates of the several states of our Union, have 

undergone sensible change since the dates of their first settlements; that the degrees of 

both cold and heat are moderated. The same opinion prevails as to Europe; and facts 

gleaned from history give reason to believe that since the time of Augustus Caesar, the 

climate of Italy for example has changed regularly, at the rate of 1° of Fahrenheit’s 

thermometer for every century. May we not hope that the methods invented in later times 

for measuring with accuracy the degrees of heat and cold, and the observations which 

have been, and will be made and preserved will at length ascertain this curious fact in 

physical history?
13

 

 

Jefferson had written previously about climate change. In the 1780s he and his friend James 

Madison—who together made the first simultaneous, coordinated meteorological observations in 

American history, in 1778
14

— carried on a long intellectual rivalry with the Comte de Buffon, 

who argued that New World climates resulted in stunted animal and human development as 

compared to those of Europe. Jefferson was eager to refute these theories.
15

 Arming himself with 

data to refute Buffon led in part to Jefferson’s remarks in Notes on the State of Virginia, written 

in 1785, in which he declared that “[a] change in our climate…is taking place very sensibly”
16

—

words he echoed almost verbatim 31 years later. He admitted however that no “regular evidence” 

other than the possibly faulty recollections and general observations of individuals could prove 

the theory of climate change.
17

 His views on climate change were influenced by North Carolina 

physician and fellow revolutionary Hugh Williamson with whom Jefferson corresponded for 30 

years and whose work he recommended to the public after Williamson’s death in 1819.
18

 In his 

1811 book Observations on the Climate in Different Parts of America, Williamson set out a 

theory of anthropogenic climate change, arguing that deforestation and agricultural development 

increased heat reflected by the Earth and resulted in higher temperatures and more moderate 

winters.
19

 Jefferson and Williamson’s theories on climate change—the moderation of seasons, 

                                                 
12

 Jefferson, “Weather,” 34-80, 81-85. 
13

 Ibid., 83. 
14

 James Rodger Fleming, Meteorology in America, 1800-1870 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 

9. 
15

 Daniel L. Druckenbrod, Michael E. Mann, David W. Stahle, Malcolm K. Cleaveland, Matthew D. Therrell and 

Herman H. Shugart,“Late-Eighteenth-Century Precipitation Reconstructions from James Madison’s Montpelier 

Plantation,” Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 84 (2003): 57-71. 
16

 Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1976), 79. 
17

 Thomas Jefferson to Nathaniel Chapman, December 11, 1809, in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson: Retirement 

Series, ed. J. Jefferson Looney (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005) II:70-71. 
18

 George Sheldon, Hugh Williamson: Physician, Patriot and Founding Father (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 

2010), 252-53. 
19

 Hugh Williamson, Observations on the Climate in Different Parts of America, Compared with the Climate in 

Corresponding Parts of the Other Continent (New York: T. & J. Swords, 1811), 9-10. 



 History of Meteorology 7 (2015) 18 

 
 

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decrease in snow cover and anthropogenic causation—were, if not fully congruent, closely 

aligned. 

Jefferson’s weather book was a living testament to his ability to view the physical and 

environmental world on a dualistic level. The first level was the very local world of his crops, 

Monticello’s brown soil and green gardens, the fields of wheat and corn, Poplar Forest’s tobacco 

acreage, and the day-to-day concerns of plowing, hoeing, reaping and harvesting. On this level, 

minute concerns such as the temperature of the soil and the exact measurements of rainfall were 

of paramount importance, because they affected the economic well-being of both the slave and 

free residents of Jefferson’s domains. Yet hovering above this world in a sort of conceptual 

twilight was nothing less than the broad scope of Earth, its atmosphere and natural rhythms, as a 

planetary and even cosmic system with all its constituent parts intimately connected. Jefferson 

remarked upon comets, earthquakes, lightning, animal die-offs, snows in Canada, and the 

ambient temperature of Italy nearly two thousand years before.
20

 The casual coexistence of 

minute environmental detail with broad strokes of planetary climatology demonstrate both the 

limits and the limitlessness of the physical worlds Jefferson saw himself as inhabiting. 

Jefferson made the ultimate summation of his data in December 1816, following his 

extensive observations on the Year Without Summer phenomena—the most visible 

manifestation of Cold Decade anomalies. He ceased keeping systematic weather observations 

after this date. The decade of the 1810s was, for Jefferson, largely a period of completing various 

long-term projects in his life, such as an extensive program of planting and landscaping at Poplar 

Forest, begun in 1782, which was concluded in 1819. He may have been clearing the decks to 

concentrate on the project he regarded as the last service of his life, the establishment of the 

University of Virginia.
21

 He might have brought his 30-year study of climate to a close at this 

time because of this desire to settle accounts, or it is possible that the impetus to summarize his 

data in a form that might lend itself to proving climate change may have been a response to the 

weather events of 1816. The documentary evidence cannot clearly tell us one way or another. 

Nevertheless, regardless of Jefferson’s reason for ceasing his weather watching in 1816, his 

notes are an interesting illumination of how some Cold Decade weather watchers viewed the 

planetary environment. 

 

Case Study: George Mackenzie and the “System” of the Winds 
 

On November 1, 1802—coincidentally the same day Jefferson began keeping his weather book 

in Virginia—an eccentric Scotsman named George Mackenzie, a tacksman of Caithness in the 

far north of Scotland, began keeping his own chronicle of weather data. A local militia officer 

who served in various places in the British Isles during the Napoleonic Wars, Mackenzie kept his 

weather observations for many years, noting particularly wind speed and direction, the length of 

rains and daily temperature.
22

 His observations formed a rich record of weather in Britain during 

the early years of the 19th century and especially the Cold Decade. From this source text 

Mackenzie began writing a hefty tome about British weather patterns, evidently consisting 

mostly of his opinions and observations drawn from his weather data. Then in the final stages of 

completion of his manuscript came the strange wet summer of 1816, and with it the discovery 

                                                 
20

 Jefferson, “Weather,” 34-80. 
21

 McEwan, Thomas Jefferson: Farmer, 187-90. 
22

 Robert Fittis, Illustrations of the History & Antiquities of Perthshire (Perth, UK: Constitutional Office, 1874) [no 

page number]. A “tacksman” is a leaseholder of an estate, treated as sort of a minor nobleman. 



 History of Meteorology 7 (2015) 19 

 
 

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that George Mackenzie believed defined his life and would secure his place in the history of 

science.
23

 The events of the Cold Decade were unmistakably a motivator of Mackenzie’s 

theoretical endeavors. 

“Summer 1816 came,” Mackenzie wrote, “and…its character was such, that [I] could not 

resist making an attempt to find out the cause of such severe changes.” To this end he revised his 

manuscript extensively. Discarding external factors such as sunspots or global cooling—subjects 

much-discussed in the press and public arena in 1816 as potential causes of the anomalies
24

—

Mackenzie believed the explanation lay in the data he’d already observed. In July 1817 he 

discovered what he thought was the answer: the directions of the winds and the total numbers of 

days on which they blew from each quarter formed a 54-year cycle, same the world over. The 

result, published in Edinburgh in 1818, was a book entitled The System of the Weather of the 

British Islands; Discovered in 1816 and 1817 from A Journal Commencing November 1802. 

According to Mackenzie the “System” was an infallible method of predicting long-term weather 

trends—in essence, the distillation of weather into climate.
25

 

Mackenzie classified each day in the weather year, which lasted from November 1 to 

October 31, according to the prevailing directions of its winds. If a wind blew east consistently 

during a day, he classified that as a day of east wind; if west, it was a day of west wind; if he 

recorded both east and west winds over the course of a day, or if at any time the winds shifted to 

northerly or southerly winds, he classified it as a “variable day.” His years of data told him that 

each year had an average of 216 days of westerly winds and 135 days of easterly winds. The 

ratio of these averages was Mackenzie’s ultimate baseline, and each individual year was 

measured against it, resulting in its declaration as an “excess” or “deficiency.” Mackenzie also 

counted days of rain. From these classifications evolved the curious vocabulary Mackenzie used 

throughout his work, in which he repeats phrases like “wet cold summer,” “mild wet winter” and 

“extreme dry” (used as a noun, as in, winter 1803-04 is an extreme dry). He also spoke of 

“storms,” which usually meant wind excesses that lasted several years in succession; winter 

1812, for instance, was the “second winter of a storm.”
26

 

To Mackenzie the most important feature of the System was the repeatability of the 54-

year cycle. Deficiencies and excesses, storms, wets and drys followed in an immutable pattern. 

“[T]he weather of one 54 years, is the same as the weather of the next 54 years, or any other 54 

years corresponding in the order of the series.”
27

 Yet this did not mean that every individual 

point-source weather observation would correspond exactly to the same point-source observation 

taken exactly 54 years later. The excess and deficiencies of the winds would naturally vary 

during an individual year, breaking any correlation between specific times and places. Put 

another way, Mackenzie argued that the average weather patterns for the year 1816 as a whole, 

measured in terms of excess/deficiency, dry/wet and mild/severe, would correspond to those for 

1870 as a whole. “It must therefore become desirable,” Mackenzie wrote, “to ascertain how far 

                                                 
23

 George Mackenzie, The System of the Weather of the British Islands; Discovered in 1816 and 1817 from a 

Journal Commencing November 1802 (Edinburgh: William Aitken, 1818), b, x-xxv, 3-6. 
24

 See, e.g., “On the Cold of the Late Summer,” New York Weekly Museum, December 14, 1816. 
25

 Mackenzie, System, 3-5. 
26

 Ibid., b-xxv, 10, 69, 71-72. 
27

 Ibid., 5. 



 History of Meteorology 7 (2015) 20 

 
 

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one revolution of the system of the weather corresponds with another in every particular.” He 

expected that future weather observations would work out this wrinkle.
28

 

George Mackenzie’s significance to the climate history of the Cold Decade lay not in the 

substantive accuracy of his System but in his efforts to develop it and his thinking about climate 

and the environment in general. Mackenzie’s System proved inaccurate and unconvincing to 

scientific readers and the public at large, but he did make the conceptual leap from point-source 

weather to regional and global climate.
29

 Mackenzie was essentially reversing the thinking of 

Early Modern and Enlightenment-era weather watchers. From roughly 1660 to the middle of the 

18th century earlier weather watchers like Robert Boyle and John Locke attempted to hold up 

weather and meteorological observation as a mirror in which one could supposedly view the 

broader harmony of natural laws. Essentially they wanted to use weather observations to validate 

preexisting philosophical conceptions of how the universe worked, and in this effort they were 

largely frustrated.
30

 Mackenzie, however, entered the Cold Decade without any apparent 

allegiance to a philosophical or scientific theory of how weather and climate worked. The desire 

to understand the anomalies of the Cold Decade motivated him to fashion such a theory that 

would validate his years-long efforts in weather watching. His theory would vindicate him, not 

the other way around. 

 

Case Study: Luke Howard and the “Barograph Clock” 
 

Among the weather-watchers of the Cold Decade, the one who came the closest to a professional 

was the learned Briton called Luke Howard. A chemist by trade, he owned a large firm that 

manufactured pharmaceutical chemicals for industry and retail druggists. Successful as he was at 

this profession, his true passion, like George Mackenzie, was the observation and investigation 

of weather phenomena. Howard was most famous for the paper he presented in 1802 to the 

Askesian Society—which he helped found—setting forth a classification of cloud types and 

introducing into meteorology the classic nomenclature of nimbus, stratus, and cumulus.
31

 He also 

kept meticulous weather observations which became more sophisticated when in 1814 he 

acquired a device he called a “barograph clock” from the estate of its creator, Scottish 

watchmaker Alexander Cumming. The barograph clock Howard acquired was a copy of the 

device Cumming built for King George III in 1765. It was a barometer equipped with a pen that 

recorded atmospheric pressure readings over time on colossal ring-shaped graphs, each one 

taking a year to complete; they were as much works of art as scientific documents. The 

barograph data formed the backbone of Howard’s multi-volume study The Climate of London, 

published in 1818.
32

 

                                                 
28

 “An Account of the System of the Weather of the British Islands, Discovered by Lieut. George Mackenzie,” 

Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine IV (October 1818-March 1819): 86. 
29

 “Art. VII, The System of the Weather of the British Islands,” The British Critic, New Series XVII (Jan.-June 

1822): 510. 
30

 Daston, “Unruly Weather,” 233-35.  
31

 Cox, Storm Watchers, 13-15. 
32

 Luke Howard, Barometrographia: Twenty Years’ Variation in the Barometer in the Climate of Britain, Exhibited 

in Autographic Curves, with the Attendant Winds and Weather, and Copious Notes Illustrative of the Subject 

(London: Richard & John E. Taylor, 1847), first page, penultimate and last page; Luke Howard, The Climate of 

London, Deduced from Meteorological Observations Made in the Metropolis and at Various Places Around It 

(London: Harvery & Darton, 1833), passim. 



 History of Meteorology 7 (2015) 21 

 
 

 21 

Howard, like Mackenzie, began searching for patterns in the weather data he collected. 

The “Cycle” he explicated in The Climate of London was much less ritualistic and mathematical 

than Mackenzie’s, but Howard’s result was at least functionally similar. He suggested that 

climate patterns fell into a 17-year cycle, with average temperature of seasons being one 

important correlating factor. The key to recognizing the Cycle was the year 1816, whose 

extremes provided Howard the most prominent point of reference. 
 

The year 1816, which was the coldest of the Cycle, appears to have had its parallels in 

1799 and 1782; and now there is every reason to conclude, from present appearances, that 

the warm temperatures of 1806 will re-appear in 1823; which will probably be the 

warmest, and 1833 the coldest, upon the whole year, of a Cycle of seventeen years, 

beginning with 1817.
33

 

 

Ostensibly Howard did not endeavor to explain the climate of any place other than London. 

However, the cosmic and planetary dimensions of this thinking are still evident in The Climate of 

London, albeit less explicit than those of Mackenzie or Jefferson. Howard collected a large array 

of environmental anecdotes in The Climate of London, most from newspaper media: reports of 

earthquakes, volcanoes, lightning, atmospheric oddities and celestial events from all over the 

world, far-removed from London. For example, he remarked upon a supposed connection 

between meteors and an earthquake in South Africa, the early onset of winter 1810 in Siberia, 

and seismic/volcanic activity in Venezuela in 1812.
34

 He did not explain how these events 

affected the climate of London, but the fact that he included them demonstrates his belief in the 

interconnection of global weather and climate phenomena—a belief that perhaps he simply 

assumed his readers would share. Essentially, Howard transitioned from the local layer to the 

cosmic/planetary one without discussing anything in between. That he felt he did not need to 

make the connection explicit is telling, as it reflects an instinctive appreciation of the relevance 

of local conditions to broader processes. 

Howard also asserted that the Moon had considerable influence on terrestrial climate, 

affecting rain patterns, barometric fluctuations and temperatures. The year 1816 was again 

important in leading Howard to this conclusion. Breaking down mean temperature readings 

according to phases of the Moon, he declared that the orbit of the Moon during 1816 “appears to 

have had a wet and dry side, as regards the Moon’s influence on…our climate.”
35

 Nevertheless, 

he refrained from placing any one factor at the determinative center of his Cycle, as Mackenzie 

had done with his tallies of wind direction. Consequently, Howard’s Cycle is much vaguer than 

Mackenzie’s System, and he equivocated about it, frankly admitting that he could be wrong and 

that only future observations could determine if it had any validity.
36

 

After the Cold Decade ended Howard continued to refine his theories of lunar influence 

on climate. In 1841 he submitted a paper to the Royal Society of London, setting forth a new 

iteration of the Cycle which he had by then revised to 18 years, and in which he now began to 

include solar radiation.
37

 This long preoccupation, as well as that of explaining the climate of 

                                                 
33

 Ibid., I:43-44.. 
34

 Ibid., II:96, 125, 168-69. 
35

 Ibid., II:155, 183. 
36

 Cox, Storm Watchers, 15. 
37

 Luke Howard, “On the Proportions of the Prevailing Winds, the Mean Temperature, and the Depth of Rain in the 

Climate of London, Computed Through a Cycle of Eighteen Years, or Periods of the Moon’s Declination,” 



 History of Meteorology 7 (2015) 22 

 
 

 22 

London, was rooted in the events of the Cold Decade. As with Mackenzie and Jefferson, this 

decade, and especially the year 1816, were important motivators and clarifiers of Howard’s lines 

of thinking. For all three men, the Cold Decade was a lens that brought their existing 

environmental consciousness into especially clear relief. 

 

Weather Watchers and the State of Meteorological Science 
 

In an era before institutionalized research, scientific specialization and formal degree programs, 

who “counted” as a meteorologist in the 1810s was largely a matter of opinion. Some scientific 

writers expressed the opinion that, well-meaning as they may have been, weather watchers were 

not helping advance the science of meteorology. In a lengthy 1818 article surveying the 

condition of the discipline, the Edinburgh Review seemed to be rebuking weather watchers—

especially those like Mackenzie who spun elaborate webs of unsupported theory—when its 

anonymous author lamented: 
 

Every person possessing a slight tincture of physical science, conceives himself qualified 

to speculate concerning the phenomena of weather, in which he feels a deep interest; and 

hence, a very flimsy and spurious kind of philosophy, however trifling and despicable it 

may appear in the eyes of the few who are accustomed to think more profoundly, has 

gained currency among certain classes of men, and engendered no small share of conceit. 

Meteorology is a complex science, depending on so many subordinate principles, that 

require the union of accurate theory, with a range of nice and various observations, as to 

have advanced very slowly towards perfection.
38

 

 

This sentiment was shared across the Atlantic as well. In reviewing another “System”-like book 

on atmospheric phenomenon by another weather watcher—British physician and future 

phrenologist Thomas Ignatius Maria Forster—a New England journal identified “the rise of 

water into the atmosphere and its return to earth” as a prime example of a scientific process 

crucial to the understanding of meteorology that was as yet unexplained. The reviewer remarked 

“this department of science is encumbered with many loose opinions, and some fanciful and 

inadequate hypothesis, which retard rather than assist the inquirer in his investigations.” In other 

words, weather watchers were holding back the discipline, or even skewing it from its proper 

course.
39

 

This arguably cogent criticism notwithstanding, the weather watchers nonetheless filled a 

void. The public’s interest in and demand for meteorological and climatological information and 

analysis grew over the course of the Cold Decade, especially in its second half. Before 1810 it 

was relatively rare for major newspapers in the United States or Great Britain to devote 

significant space to weather-related matters such as daily or weekly temperature or precipitation 

records; by 1820 many newspapers were regularly doing so.
40

 The Philadelphia Register and 

                                                                                                                                                             
Abstracts of the Papers Printed in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London IV:300 (April 29, 

1841). 
38

 “Polar Ice, and a North-West Passage,” Edinburgh Review XXX, no. LIX (1818), 5. 
39

 “Review: Researches about Atmospheric Phenomena by Thomas Forster,” New-England Journal of Medicine and 

Surgery, and Collateral Branches of Science 6 (Jan. 1817), 1-11. 
40

 See, e.g., “Miscellaneous: The Weather,” The Monthly Visitant; or, Something Old, August 1, 1816, 1-2; 

“Meteorological: From the Philadelphia Union,” Niles’ Weekly Register, August 15, 1818, 14; “Meteorology: The 



 History of Meteorology 7 (2015) 23 

 
 

 23 

National Recorder, for example, in March 1819 gave several column inches to Josiah Meigs—

former President of the University of Georgia and then currently Commissioner of the U.S. 

General Land Office—to present a panoply of meteorological data collected by U.S. Land Office 

clerks in Detroit and Savannah. The data was exactly the kind in which the weather watchers 

reveled: temperature and barometric statistics, winds and precipitation. “If such observations are 

continued,” Meigs wrote, “as I hope they will be, for a few years, much interesting knowledge of 

the meteorology of our country will be effected.”
41

 Similarly, Niles’ Weekly Register of 

Baltimore devoted seven pages the same year (1819) to tables of weather data compiled at 

Chillicothe, Ohio by weather watcher Samuel Williams over the previous two years. Williams 

noted temperature, wind direction, cloud cover and cloud type day-by-day from July 1, 1817 to 

June 30 of the following year, and in explanatory statements and marginalia commented on 

storms, vapors in the atmosphere, moon haloes, the ripening of peas and strawberries, and 

provided a boastful description of his thermometer which was imported from London.
42

  

Across the Atlantic, another example of the demand for and saturation of meteorological 

news content comes from the Naval Chronicle, essentially the trade journal of the British Royal 

Navy. The “Meteorological Register,” a systematized table of barometric pressure, temperature 

data and descriptions of weather events in Covent Garden, London, made its first appearance in 

this publication during the summer of 1815. By the end of the Naval Chronicle’s publication run 

in 1818, the Meteorological Register had become much more detailed and elaborate, and notably 

adopted and enthusiastically endorsed the cloud classification system of weather watcher Luke 

Howard. The weather content of the Naval Chronicle had become, by the end of the Cold 

Decade, a cornucopia of the same expansive obsessions as those that consumed the weather 

watchers: large tables of weather readings, historical comparisons, narratives on the character of 

seasons and the coming of crops, ruminations on polar ice, sunspots, earthquakes and “cavities” 

in the atmosphere, sprinkled with the dropped names of presumed experts and casual citations to 

philosophical journals.
43

 The increasing presence of meteorological data in both American and 

British media is evidence that the study of weather was creeping out of the parlors and gardens 

of private citizens and into the public mind. 

This demand for meteorological data fits into the context of the evolution of public 

thought on weather, meteorology and climate throughout the 19th century. At what might be 

termed the ground level, popular almanacs, which contained astronomical and astrological 

information, agricultural and practical environmental tips and often made rudimentary attempts 

                                                                                                                                                             
Weather,” National Register, August 7, 1819, 8. For weather reporting early in the decade, see, e.g., “State of the 

Thermometer,” American Register, Vol. 7, 1810, American Periodicals 135. 
41

 Josiah Meigs, “Meteorological: Detroit, Savannah,” Philadelphia Register and National Recorder, March 27, 

1819, 1. Meigs’s writings were part of a larger project—ultimately unsuccessful in his lifetime—to convince the 

U.S. government to establish a protocol for systematic and uniform weather observation and data collection. 

Fleming, Meteorology in America, 17-19. 
42

 Samuel Williams, “Meteorological Register,” Niles’ Weekly Register, February 20, 1819, 15. 
43

 “Meteorological Register,” The Naval Chronicle for 1815; Containing a General and Biographical History of the 

Royal Navy of the United Kingdom XXXIII (Jan.-June 1815) 56; “Meteorological Register,” The Naval Chronicle 

for 1816; Containing a General and Biographical History of the Royal Navy of the United Kingdom XXXVI (Jul.-

Dec. 1816) 175, 349, 438, 516; The Naval Chronicle for 1817; Containing a General and Biographical History of 

the Royal Navy of the United Kingdom XXXVII (Jan.-Jun. 1817) 373, 80-84, 145-52, 174; “Meteorological 

Register,” The Naval Chronicle for 1818; Containing a General and Biographical History of the Royal Navy of the 

United Kingdom XL (July-Dec. 1818) 163. 



 History of Meteorology 7 (2015) 24 

 
 

 24 

at weather forecasting, were a staple literature of the period, especially in the United States.
44

 At 

a higher level, that of scientific thinkers and writers who tended to think of themselves as 

gatekeepers of the discipline of meteorology, demand was high for consistency and standards in 

empirical weather observations, and this demand grew over the 1820s and 1830s.
45

 By the 

Victorian era the development of the telegraph (beginning in the late 1830s) and widespread data 

sharing via transatlantic cables (1850s) sparked the establishment of predictive weather 

forecasting, which Katharine Anderson argues is the defining feature of truly modern 

meteorological science.
46

 The growth of public demand for meteorological information during 

the Cold Decade helped prepare the landscape for these developments. 

 

Conclusion: The Weather Watchers and Environmental Consciousness 
 

The weather watchers conceived of the environment as existing in two distinct but interrelated 

layers: a local layer of crops, occupational activities and point-source weather conditions, and a 

broader planetary or cosmic layer encompassing broader trends of climate as well as global and 

celestial occurrences. My characterization of the weather watchers’ environmental consciousness 

as dual-layered has significant commonalities with the observations of worldview within climate 

and weather history in general—for instance, Lorraine Daston’s examination of Early Modern 

naturalists and their attempts to illuminate broadly-applicable natural laws (essentially, the 

cosmic layer) through observation of point-source weather phenomena (the local layer).
47

 Clearly 

the dual-layered view was not exclusive to weather watchers nor to the Cold Decade. Although 

the experience of weather watchers during a single decade cannot be divorced from the 

continuities they shared with pre-1810 and post-1820 experience, the Cold Decade with its 

clearly visible weather anomalies and its positioning within the context of the history of 

meteorology provides an interesting lens through which to view this dual-layered environmental 

consciousness. 

The weather watchers were undoubtedly a product of their age. Thomas Jefferson, 

George Mackenzie and Luke Howard were neither the discoverers of new processes and 

phenomena nor the architects of new forms of scientific thinking. But despite their limitations, 

shortcomings and conceits, they filled a void in public discourse that was seeking answers to the 

riddles posed by the anomalies of the Cold Decade. They attempted to explain what many people 

believed was inexplicable, and in doing so demonstrated, if nothing else, an admirable audacity. 

 

 

 

Acknowledgements 

 

I wish to thank the following persons and institutions for their support: Matthew J. Dennis of the 

University of Oregon, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Huntington Library, the 

American Antiquarian Society, James Rodger Fleming, and Cody Climer.  

                                                 
44

 See, e.g., Dedham Pocket Almanac and New England Calendar for the Year of Our Lord 1812 (Dedham, NH: H. 

Mann, 1811). 
45

 Janković, Reading the Skies, 161-67. 
46

 Katharine Anderson, Predicting the Weather: Victorians and the Science of Meteorology (Chicago: University of 

Chicago Press, 2005), 1-7. 
47

 Daston, “Unruly Weather,” 235-36. 


