Meteorologica
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It's a pretty safe bet that people have been thinking about the weather for as long as they've been thinking, but the Greek philosopher Aristotle was the first person to organize and record his weather thoughts in a systematic way. In a book he called Meteorologica, which dates to around 340 BC, Aristotle dealt with the properties and processes of everything that happens between the surface of the earth and the orbit of the moon -- from comets to clouds.

Aristotle grappled with a lot of the questions that weather researchers still study today ­ the cause of lightning, why seasonal rainfall varies from region to region, the relationship between cloud height and precipitation, the origin of wind direction and speed.

The questions were sound; unfortunately most of the answers were wrong. Aristotle's core problem was that he based all his explanations on two false assumptions ­ first that the earth is at the center of the cosmos, and second, and even more fatal, that four elements ­ earth, water, air and fire ­ make up everything in our world including weather. Rather than look out the window and study what was falling from the sky, Aristotle kept trying to squeeze atmospheric phenomena into the four-element theory.

Aristotle's Meteorologica did not give us a sound foundation for weather science ­ but the book did establish meteorology as a distinct discipline of study and, more importantly, it grounded the new discipline on the assumption that whatever happens in the sky has a rational explanation. And of course the book had a catchy title ­ after all, we're still using it more than 2,000 years later.