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Weather Frog
Mon Aug 16, 2004
Listen in RealAudio 
Long before we had The Weather Channel to deliver the local forecast to us 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 this is 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: “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. To download your own virtual Weather Frog, hop over to
our website at www.weathernotebook.org.
Today's Links
Froggy, the Weather Frog
http://www.froggy.cc/englisch/index.html
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