A weather expert's “humanities-atmospheric sciences rabbit hole” raises new questions about how early writers observed the natural world.

This story is part of Humanities in Practice, a Franklin College of Arts and Sciences series exploring the value of the humanities in work and everyday life.

Marshall Shepherd calls it a “humanities-atmospheric sciences rabbit hole.”

The atmospheric scientist entered it after watching the 2026 film The Odyssey with his family and wondering whether the storms in Homer’s epic resembled actual weather. The question soon expanded beyond Odysseus’ voyage. Ancient literature contains accounts of storms, eruptions, shifting winds, and the effects of climate on human health. Some may preserve observations made long before modern instruments existed.

Shepherd and colleagues explored the subject in a Sept. 17 Forbes article, “The Odyssey, Weather and Rare Medicanes.” At the time, colleagues were tracking the possible formation of a medicane, a rare Mediterranean storm that resembles a tropical cyclone. Odysseus never encountered one, Shepherd concluded, but Homer’s epic may contain memories of weather familiar to Mediterranean sailors.

Shepherd’s article draws on a 1993 analysis of The Odyssey by Randall Cerveny, a geographer and climatologist at Arizona State University. Cerveny applied modern meteorological theory to Homer’s account of the Greek voyages. He found that the weather described during roughly the first three weeks after the fleets left Troy remained within the bounds of known meteorology.

The ships’ positions could reflect the passage of a cold front across the Aegean Sea, Cerveny suggested. He linked some of the early disasters to a possible summertime cyclone. The storm that attacks Odysseus’ raft could be one of the earliest descriptions of a microburst, a concentrated column of sinking air capable of producing powerful winds near the ground.

“The weather is a central feature,” Shepherd said. “There are many land-sea breeze and coastal meteorology processes evident through the story as well.”

Shepherd also examined the weeks Odysseus and his crew spend stranded on the island of Thrinacia by unfavorable winds. He wondered whether a coastal sea breeze could explain the episode. These breezes usually reverse direction each day, which makes them an unlikely explanation for the winds Homer describes.

For Homer’s audience, the gods controlled the weather. Poseidon sends the storm that attacks Odysseus’ raft, while Zeus punishes the crew for killing the cattle of Helios. Prayer and sacrifice might influence such forces, though human beings could never expect to control them.

That difference is important to Charles Platter, a professor of classics. He advises caution when comparing Homer’s scenes with modern science. The Odyssey grew out of an oral tradition and took shape over generations. Its descriptions were influenced by observation and by the demands of poetic meter.

“Homer’s storms don’t tell us a lot about the details of weather, beyond the identifications of winds that blow from different directions,” Platter said.

Even so, the poems preserve clues about the weather ancient Greeks noticed. A scientist familiar with coastal conditions may recognize the significance of a detail that has long been treated as part of the scenery.

“Literary passages that deal with weather are often badly understood by scholars less accustomed to living their lives outdoors,” Platter said. “Actually knowing about meteorology also attunes you to issues of geography.”

The same questions extend well beyond Homer. Some ancient writers recorded events they had witnessed. Pliny the Younger described the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in letters recounting the death of his uncle, Pliny the Elder. His letters tell what people saw and did as the disaster unfolded. Researchers have used those observations to better understand the eruption.

Ancient medical writers had their own questions about the natural world. Airs, Waters, Places, a text attributed to Hippocrates, considered how climate and geography affected health. Some of its ideas belong firmly to its time, while others reflect an effort to explain illness through physical conditions.

Written accounts are especially useful to climate scientists studying periods that predate modern instruments. Researchers compare the texts with archaeological discoveries and evidence preserved in the environment. Classicists help establish what the words meant in their original setting and whether a modern interpretation asks too much of them.

Ancient writers had no instruments to measure the wind and no satellites to show them a storm’s path. They recorded what they could see and remember. Those observations sometimes survived in literature, where scientists can still find them centuries later.