Predicting Weather By The Moon - Xavier University Libraries

Weather By The Moon
during the day. Or that during each month there is one day
near Last Quarter when the Moon doesn’t rise until after
midnight and therefore into the next day, and one similar
day near 1st Quarter when the Moon doesn’t set.
The phases bring their own weather patterns. Cloudiness
is quite influenced by small-scale local topography –
ridges, bodies of water, hills and cities. But atmospherictidal
effects make clouds formation predictable to some
degree: the presence of clouds changing whether or not
the Moon is risen or has set. For instance around a New
Moon, if rain is about, as in the colder months, then we can
more expect it between early evening and the following
dawn, the skies being generally clearer during the day.
At the beginning of its Phase cycle, if you could imagine
three balls viewed from above, being the Earth, Moon
and Sun, it would be as if the Moon in the middle starts to
move anticlockwise away from the Sun and around the Earth.
Of course the Earth is spinning all the while within the
Moon’s orbit. Every time the Earth moves 360deg, the
Moon moves 12deg.
The following Moon shapes apply to the northern
hemisphere. In the Southern Hemisphere the Moon is reversed,
so just think of it the other way round. This is because
to those in the north, southern hemisphere folk are
standing on their heads. In the northern hemisphere the
moon moves from left sky to right sky(their East to West)
but E to W as viewed from the south is from right to left.
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