Meteorologists have always been unadventurous in their efforts to predict the future. Traditionally they have gone about their task with such mundane accoutrements as a chart, a pencil, a rubber and a brush. (This last tool, lest you wonder, was essential for removing the debris created by the preceding item, as the pattern of isobars and fronts was continually refined to fit the information plotted on the chart.)
In recent years their methodology is duller still: they just feed the information to a computer and wait for the answer to pop up on the screen.
The techniques of other futurologists are more inspiring. Close namesakes of meteorologists, for example those who practice meteoromancy, take their inspiration from meteors, or shooting stars; their frequency, longevity and general behaviour, it seems, are very reliable as a rough guide to things to come.
Aeromancers, too, must be seen as close relatives of meteorologists, since they divine the future from the behaviour of the air and winds. A variation of this discipline is capnomancy, where the focus of attention is a rising plume of smoke.
On a different tack entirely, Oliver St John Gogarty in As I was Going Down Sackville Street describes another forecasting technique, the sortes Virgilianae, in some detail. It involves placing a volume of the complete works of Virgil on a table and inserting a latchkey randomly between the leaves - this being done preferably by "a child, a chaste person, or a priest".
The lines adjacent to the latchkey's tip are then applied predictively to a chosen set of circumstances. Variations are sortes Biblicae, using the Holy Book, or sortes Homericae, tapping the expertise of the author of the Odyssey.
Ornithomancy, on the other hand, relies for its success on birds. Useful predictions can be made from the pattern and direction of their flight, the sounds they make, and the way in which they take food.
Further information can be extracted from a bird by slaughtering it, or indeed any other animal, and then examining the entrails for any abnormalities - this being the noble science of haruspicy.
This technique can be further refined into crithomancy by strewing barley meal on the innards of the sacrificial victim.
If all else fails one can try a spot of gyromancy, which involves drawing a circle on the ground and walking around it until dizziness causes one to fall; the orientation, posture and general demeanour of the corpus then reveal a wealth of information on the future.
The exercise may also provide opportunities for scatomancy, whose methodology, I fear, is not within the scope of Weather Eye.