In certain parts of Ireland you may have had reason yesterday to call to mind a Dutchman by the name of Christopher Buys Ballot. He was the originator of what is sometimes seen as the only infallible law in the whole science of meteorology, that which tells us that if you stand with your back to the wind in the northern hemisphere the pressure is lower to your left than to your right.
It is only a small step from what I once heard a German colleague refer to as "zis thumb of ze rule" to the fundamental principle that underlies any meaningful interpretation of the weather map: the notion that the wind blows in an anti-clockwise direction around a depression and clockwise around a high.
Anaximander of Ionia, a Greek philosopher who lived in the sixth century BC was allegedly the first to wonder whither came the wind, and he defined it, not inaccurately, as "a flowing movement of the air".
Then no one thought about the matter much for a full two thousand years, until with the advent of the age of exploration,
mariners began to notice that there was a pattern to the global winds. Finally Edmond Halley, he of comet fame, having travelled extensively in his younger days, used his carefully collected observations to draw the first complete map of the world's prevailing winds.
It was published in 1686, and showed the trades, the monsoons and all the other well-known seasonal features quite familiar to us now.
Halley also provided a scientific explanation. Before him, it was suspected that the easterly trade winds in the vicinity of the equator occurred because the atmosphere was unable to keep up with the rapidly rotating Earth below; it lagged behind, producing an apparent westward movement of the air.
Halley, however, assigned the global wind system to differential heating of the Earth's surface by the sun, and gave the essentials of the theory of the general circulation that we know today.
But it was Buys Ballot in 1857 who unlocked the finer detail. "Les grandes differences barometriques, dans les limites de notre pays, sont suivies par des vents plus forts," began his enunciation of what is known nowadays as Buys Ballot's Law.
"Great barometric differences, within the limits of our country, are followed by stronger winds; and the wind is in general perpendicular, or nearly so, to the direction of greatest barometric slope, in such a way that a decrease of pressure from north to south is followed by an east wind, and a decrease from south to north by a west wind."