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Weather Frogs
08/26/2002
Listen in RealAudio 
Long before we had the Weather Channel to deliver the local forecast to our television sets 24 hours a day, people relied on clues from nature to tell them what the weather would be like. One clue came from an unlikely source known as the weather frog.
Hi, I'm Bryan Yeaton and you're listening to The Weather Notebook.
In Old World Europe, people often kept a small tree frog in a glass partially filled with water. Inside the glass was a miniature ladder upon which the frog could perch. According to folklore, the frog would climb up the ladder as pleasant weather approached-the higher the frog ascended, the better the weather. When gloomy weather was about to set in, the frog would descend down the ladder into the water.
Whether or not there was any scientific basis for the frog's maneuvers is subject to debate, but Europeans trusted their amphibian forecasters so much that in modern-day Germany, people still reserve a special name for a meteorologist or anyone with more than a passing interest in weather: they call them Wetterfrosch , which literally means "weather frog."
If you'd like your own "weather frog" to tell you what the weather will be like, you can download a free program for your computer's desktop that shows a little frog, named Froggy, sitting on a small ladder inside a glass-just like his real-world counterparts. Froggy will give you forecasts for over 700 cities worldwide and will even hop up and down his ladder as the forecast changes. Hmm... Frogs on the Weather Channel. It could happen.
Thanks today to writer Sean Potter. The Weather Notebook is a production of The Mount Washington Observatory and is supported generously by Subaru of America and The National Science Foundation. For more information on weather frogs go to our website at weathernotebook.org. Thanks to assistant producer, Doug Sanborn.
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