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The most direct way to find your question is to search for the name you used when you submitted it (first name, last name or both). If you did not include a name, then you can search using keywords from your question. Of course, since many weather-related terms are common to a lot of the questions we receive, this may turn up a number of others in addition to your own.

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Answer: This was a new piece of weather folklore to us, but we did find just a couple of isolated mentions of something along these lines in a quick web search. On the other hand, we also turned up an old English rhyme that stated "If a cat washes her face over her ear, 'Tis a sign the weather will be fine and clear," showing that the same feline behavior seems to have been interpreted to have opposite meanings. We can't think of any reason why either of those would successfully predict rain, or a lack thereof. There are a few of the old weather "wives tales" that have an underlying grain of truth or physical reasoning behind them, but many do not and it can be difficult to understand how they initially came to exist.
Apr. 14, 2013 | Tags: folklore, rain

Answer: There are a few things that play a role in this. Of course raindrops and the rainwater itself typically would be odor-free, but that is not the case with materials that may exist on the ground or on other surfaces that the rain drops fall onto. The most common odor associated with rain is produced by spores from a microorganism in the actinomycetes family, which develop during dry periods and are splashed into the air in the form of a fine aerosol when rain begins. This odor actually has a name, "petrichor," and is a kind of dank, woodsy smell. There area sometimes also aromas associated with the rain falling on roadways and lofting bits of tires and petrochemicals into the air, and finally, when thunderstorms are nearby there can also be a faint odor of ozone, which is created along the lightning channel and has a sharp, somewhat chlorine-bleach-like character. Under the right circumstances, the wind can carry some or all of these odors ahead of a moving area of rain, giving an olfactory alert that precipitation may soon begin!
Mar. 31, 2013 | Tags: folklore, rain

Answer: That bit of folklore seems to rest on the idea that the first snow will remove contaminants from the air that could be bad for someone consuming snow cream made with it. However, that ignores the fact the the "second snow" or any that follow are likely to have had as much of an interval since the first one as the first snow had since the most recent rain, which should have accomplished the same sort of contaminant removal, or that any pollutants in the air that are scoured out by precipitation are likely to recover to their typical background levels quite rapidly once a precipitation system has moved out of the area. Bottom line is, so long as the snow is deep enough and "fluffy" enough to make otherwise aesthetically pleasing snow cream, there is very little likelihood that freshly fallen snow collected from an open area, and otherwise undisturbed, would contain pollutants or contaminants in sufficient quantity to be a health hazard, regardless of whether it is the first of the winter or not.
Feb. 6, 2013 | Tags: folklore, snow, weather & health

Answer: A lot of people have that perception, and sometimes the high sheets of cirrus cloud cover that often produce noticeable halos do form in advance of storm systems that will later result in precipitation. However, it is also quite common that the appearance of a halo is not followed by any associated rain or snow, but instead the clouds simply dissipate or move on, and yield to fair skies again. Halos of this type are quite common, and may form on as many as 60-90 days per year in our area. However, most of us miss seeing many of these because they occur while we're indoors, or they are a rather faint or incomplete version of the halo, they may form while some lower clouds block our view, or they may develop in the daytime around the sun and go unnoticed in the bright light of day. As you can see, the frequency of halo formation is much greater than the frequency of snow events, so that we can't use the sight of a halo on its own as a reliable indicator of snow in the near future.
Jan. 7, 2013 | Tags: atmospheric optics, folklore, snow

Answer: Around 1700 Zulu, maybe? We don't really know, but it sounds like a nice place to escape the pressures of the day, shoot the breeze with other weather folks, clear the mental fog and generally un-wind. Maybe those thoughts will precipitate a few other puns from the folks who suffer through reading this response!
Dec. 30, 2012 | Tags: folklore, weather & health

Answer: Actually, the answer to BOTH parts of your question is yes. The I-95 corridor happens to lie along a zone in which typical meteorological patterns related to the geography of our region (mountains to our west and the Atlantic to our east, along with a transition from the higher, hillier Piedmont to the lower and flatter coastal plain, all of which run more or less parallel that highway) and that of the Unites States in general, frequently leads to airmass boundaries, frontal zones and precipitation type, coverage or intensity transitions in that general area. The highway itself has little if anything to do with this, but does serve as a convenient, widely-known marker for describing the location of these focused events or transition zones.
Dec. 18, 2012 | Tags: folklore, general meteorology, maps & codes

Answer: You wrote in about some lightning and thunder that occurred with a cluster of convective cells over central NC the morning of November 4th. There is a piece of wintertime folk wisdom that thunder will be followed within 10 days by snow. While there are some physical reasons that rule of thumb came about, it isn't especially reliable, and it also applies less and less the farther you move in time from mid-winter (as an extreme example, no one asks if snow is on the way within 10 days following a July thunderstorm!) We're taking a chance by answering this several days before it will appear on the web, but so far long range projections from the U.S. and European models ending on the 10th day after the thunder show no signs favoring snow in our area.
Nov. 12, 2012 | Tags: folklore, snow

Answer: There are quite a few wives tales, rules of thumb and pieces of folklore that relate to weather, and they can be fun to consider. However, we tend to focus on using analysis of weather observations, satellite and radar imagery, extrapolation of observed trends and projections using numerical weather prediction models and statistical algorithms to make our day-in, day-out forecasts.
Nov. 11, 2012 | Tags: folklore, general meteorology

Answer: We're not sure what you mean by landfall predictions in this context. There are seasonal tropical activity outlooks issued each year from several sources, such as NOAA and Colorado State University, but they do not include specific tracks or the likely numbers of landfalls. Once specific storms are underway, forecast tracks have been quite accurate in most cases, and the error associated with such forecasts has fallen greatly through the past couple of decades. As for the seasonal numbers forecasts, they have not been perfect but have generally reflected year-to-year changes reasonably well, and have generally been better than simply assuming the number of storms would match climatological averages. Here some of the numbers, showing the forecast ranges from May-June issue period from CSU and NOAA, and the observed number of named storms (Note that the average for 1981-2010 is 12). For 2009, 11-12 (CSU)/ 9-14 (NOAA)/ 9 storms observed. For 2010, 15-18 (CSU)/ 14-23 (NOAA)/ 19 storms observed. For 2011, 16 (CSU)/ 12-18 (NOAA)/ 19 storms observed. For 2012 so far, 10-13 (CSU)/ 9-15 (NOAA)/ 19 storms observed to this point. This has been a more active year than expected, as seen here, but others were reasonably well projected.

By comparison, of course, there really isn't much meaning to a groundhog winter forecast, as there are no real definitions of what early spring or six more weeks of winter actually mean, and of course there is no significant connection between long-range weather patterns and the presence or absence of clouds at a particular instant in a given location.
Oct. 30, 2012 | Tags: folklore, hurricanes

Answer: Under the right conditions, you can indeed make a reasonable estimate of how many miles away a lightning strike occurs. The sound waves (thunder) generated by the lightning strike travel about a mile in 5 seconds, so if you can time the interval between seeing the lightning flash and hearing the first arrival of thunder, dividing that time by five will give you the rough distance to the lightning channel in miles. This works best when strikes are fairly infrequent, and can be more difficult to apply when there are many lightning flashes in a short time coming from a variety of distances and directions.
Sep. 11, 2012 | Tags: folklore, lightning