From Babylon to Google: a history of weather forecasting

Recent scientific breakthroughs allowing forecasters to better predict the weather are just the latest in a long line of meteorology developments. Google's artificial intelligence (AI) arm DeepMind has developed a system allowing forecasters to predict the chance of rain within the next couple of hours with much higher precision. But people have been attempting to work out whether it is going to chuck it down or not for thousands of years. As far back as 650BC, the Babylonians, in modern-day Iraq and Syria, tried to divine the weather based on cloud patterns and astrology. By 350BC the Greek philosopher Aristotle was describing weather patterns in texts, while even Jesus Christ himself had a crack at forecasting in the New Testament.