In the past few years I have enjoyed dipping into the UGA Special Collections Library and viewing some old diaries of settlers in coastal Georgia and Carolina from the early days of the colony. As farmers, they were very aware of the weather around them and how it affected their crops. This is the science of historical climatology–looking at old written records and trying to determine the weather that they were experiencing at the time, either through specific weather records they kept (Thomas Jefferson was one of these observers) or through their daily journals of what they were doing and seeing in the world around them. You can read more about this fascinating science in this blog from the European Geophysical Union here.
