Imagine how much meterological knowledge Canada-based Aboriginal groups must possess… there’s an intrinsic benefit of having all of this ‘recorded’, not just for ourselves - but for their own future generations of Aboriginal peoples to come.
Koalas fight, shepherd’s delight, Emma Young, The Guardian, 23 October 2003
Climate researcher Nigel Tapper first realised indigenous groups might have something to teach western scientists when he was researching the dynamics of thunderstorms in the Tiwi Islands in the Timor Sea. During the wet season, these storms form almost every morning in a dark swathe stretching from Papua New Guinea, across northern Australia and into Indonesia. “The locals told us they knew when the storm was going to be big, because they happen when the tide is high in the middle of the day,” Tapper says. “At the time, we didn’t pay much attention. But later on, when we did our re-analysis of the data, we realised they were right, and we realised why - and I was intrigued by that insight.”
Eight years on and Tapper, at Monash University in Melbourne, is helping to coordinate Australia’s indigenous weather knowledge project. Initiated by the bureau of meteorology, it is the first systematic attempt to record the weather knowledge of Aboriginal people from all over the country. The main aim is to archive this information before it disappears, but Tapper hopes the project may reveal techniques to complement or improve scientific approaches to forecasting weather and modelling climate.
Greg Lehman, a PhD student, has spent 10 months searching current archives, talking to communities about the project’s aims, and selecting a geographical cross-section of clans on whom to focus. Early next year, he will start the fieldwork, travelling to Cape York in the north-east, the Gulf of Carpentaria and Arnhem Land in the north, Kimberley in the north-west, and to regions of the south-west. “I’ll also talk to more contemporary, urbanised Aboriginal communities in places like Melbourne and Sydney, to get an understanding of how traditional knowledge might have transformed over Australia’s colonial period,” Lehman says.
Existing archives show that forecasting methods vary greatly from clan to clan, as well as around the country. In Kakadu, in the Northern Territory, the flowering of the rough-barked gum and the bunch spear grass is considered a sign that wind will soon blow from the south-east and the dry season will arrive. In the Sydney area, the raucous sounds of koala fights are taken to indicate that hot weather is coming. Some clans use complex combinations of signs, including insect activity and planetary configurations, to predict particularly bad droughts. Such observations should at least be investigated by scientists, says Tapper.
“Aboriginal people have been in this continent upwards of 50,000 years. While they might not have understood the physics of what’s going on, they have certainly had a lot of time to observe the environment and to understand relationships between elements of the environment,” he says.
This is particularly true when it comes to understanding how to use fire, says Tapper. Aboriginal people in northern Australia have traditionally used controlled burning, for instance to limit the extent of fast-burning wildfires that occur late in the dry season. Choosing when and where to set a fire involves knowledge about winds and temperature changes. “Aboriginal people are very, very careful about their use of fire - and this is another area that I think Europeans have a lot to learn about,” Tapper says.
It’s not only Europeans that could benefit, says Penehuro Lefale, the Pacific Islands climate research officer at the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research in New Zealand. Urbanised indigenous people can also become cut off from traditional knowledge, he says.
Lefale’s interest in traditional Samoan knowledge was sparked in the mid-80s, when he returned from studies overseas to head the country’s climate division. After his first cyclone season in the job, he set out to talk to people in villages to discover whether they understood his warnings. “They did not. If we said the cyclone was located north-west of the island, moving at about 12 kilometres per hour, they had no idea what I meant,” he says. “Then I started talking to a lot of the elderly people, who said we don’t believe in your weather forecasting and predictions because we have our own knowledge. That’s when I got interested and starting documenting.”
Lefale thinks traditional knowledge might complement not only weather forecasting, but also the prediction of longer-term phenomena such as El Niño. Every three to five years, droughts associated with El Niño strike Samoa. Locals don’t seem to have a word for El Niño, but say they know when drought is coming. When the breadfruit tree fruits early, they stockpile the crop and start growing a type of yam that can thrive with less water. Lefale plans further work to investigate whether there might be a scientific explanation underlying this technique, and others.
In South America, potato farmers use an approach to predict El Niño that has already been validated by western science. Over several nights in the middle of June, farmers in the high Andes in Peru and Bolivia observe the brightness of stars in the Pleiades cluster. If the stars are dim, they know that the rains will be later than usual and delay planting.
When Benjamin Orlove at the University of California, Davis, investigated in the late 1990s, he realised that in the build-up to an El Niño year high cloud forms over Amazonia and obscures Pleiades stars.
In Australia, Tapper was also able to come up with a scientific explanation for the Tiwi Islanders’ observations. The thunderstorms are generated by a convergence of sea breezes that are strongest when the temperature contrast between land and ocean is greatest. This happens when there is a high tide in the middle of the day.
There is increasing awareness among scientists in many countries that indigenous knowledge is valuable, Lefale says.
In New Zealand, three of his colleagues are researching Maori weather prediction techniques. Researchers in Hawaii, the Cook Islands and Papua New Guinea are talking about similar projects. In Finland, scientists have been asking remote communities about their observations of snowfall.
Lefale is excited by this new enthusiasm. “I am convinced that documenting all this traditional knowledge will greatly improve our scientific understanding of weather and climate - particularly at the local level,” he says.