Due to low rainfall, people in central Iran have some amazing ways.
These methods have been developed over several thousand years and may have a higher accuracy than the current academic methods.
For example, in some days of September and October, they put cotton on their roofs in order to check weight change due to wetting. They use this method to determine whether the current year is going to be dry or wet.
A nice question.
There are a lot of weather and climatic proverbs in China, and farmers in ancient time and even in present time could apply them to forecast or predict the coming atmospheric phenomena or events. A new collection of the proverbs, which contains about 40,000 items in total, was published by the China Meteorological Press, Beijing, in 2013.
There are certainly IKSs across many indigenous communities in support of farming decisions but these remain largely undocumented and could benefit from formal research and documentation especially as their bases may be shifting under the weight of climate variability and change. The Chinese example is worthy of replication.
Over large tracts of the West African savannah, for example, how low/thick ambient temperatures/dust haze get during a dry season is read as an indicator of how poor/good the subsequent rainfall season will be. If daytime ambient temperatures are unusually low and dust haze is unusually thick, this is read as an indicator of a potentially problematic subsequent growing season. There is also the timing of the appearance of bright ruby, fluffy and velvety insects (mites) at the start of the rains. If these appear and disappear too quickly or appear, disappear and re-appear again, farmers become alert to the possibility of a problem-prone farming season.
Though not the focus of your question, it is pertinent to add that there are also indicators for start and end of the wet season. See publication by the International Potato Center, Kampala, Uganda, for a documentation of practices across districts in Uganda (http://dx.doi.org/10.4236/as.2013.412086) and another by Muguti and Maposa (http://www.jpanafrican.com/docs/vol4no9/4.9Indigenous.pdf).
It would be nice to have a listing of such documentation attempts for reference.
Certainty the traditional proverbs came from a sort of empirical statistics based on observations, and therefore I guess they could play a role as “climatological” baseline.
At the same time, drought must be distinguished by “aridity”. In fact, drought can be considered as “out layer”, and anomalous rain deficit, whilst aridity is more a “climatological” condition. Consequently, I guess these empirical “average” are not by definition adapt to catch any extreme weather conditions, like drought, and their capacity to forecast such events must be considered purely aleatory
In Sri Lanka farmers use many observational predictions to predict drought. Many biological clues have higher probability to be correct. There are many locally published literature unfortunately not widely available online. refer to this link for some clue. http://archives.dailynews.lk/2004/01/30/fea02.html
In Jordan many farmers use and fallow the appearance of some wild plants and beetle to predict and anticipate the drought season.
One of the most ingenious methods that Iranians used in past was Kariz or Qanat in order to have fresh water without using any pump or doing any over-extraction.
The other useful methods have been in ancient architecture of Iran. The materials and the methods that they used made their houses cooler in summer and less depended to extra devices to cool them. The cooling system was a part of body of the building.
Best regards,
Farhad
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