We've fielded lots of questions from Morning Brief readers on the relationship between animals and the weather. Do cows sit down when they know a storm is coming? Why does my cat act crazy on the day of a thunderstorm? In an effort to answer this problem once and for all, Digital Meteorologist Sara Tonks has tackled the question, "Can animals predict the weather?"

Digital Meteorologist Sara Tonks: So, I have to tell you about my dog Brody. He’s a menace to society. When I adopted him at a shelter in 2020, the first thing he did was pee on my shoe. So I named him after Chief Brody in Jaws.

If you’re asking me, can Brody predict the weather? The answer is better than I can (at least without an app or my own radar station).

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Now, I know that a storm is coming, generally, because I can look out my window. I might be able to see it, especially because my window of my apartment faces north, so I can see any storms that are coming in from the northwest, which is where we usually get weather coming in from here in Atlanta.

If I have my curtains closed, I might be looking for a storm, but then I start to see Brody's ears kind of do weird things because he's essentially got these radar dishes known as ears on top of his head.

Dogs, first of all, can hear the thunder from further away because they've got way more sensitive hearing than we do. And as the pressure drops in the atmosphere ahead of a thunderstorm, things apparently start to sound different. So, dogs can actually tell that the pressure is changing because of that, and that essentially tells them a storm is coming.

I call Brody’s ears his little radar dishes because they look like they start triangulating, trying to figure out where the storm is coming from.

He also tends to jump on top of me to feel safe.

Does that mean all of the stories that you hear about animals predicting the weather are true? Not at all. We recently looked into, for example, the old myth that cows will lay down when they know a storm is coming, but there isn’t any real science to back that. Cows lay down all of the time to chew cud. And the idea that when oar fish wash up on shore predicts an earthquake or any kind of doomsday scenario has been completely debunked.

But wild animals exhibit many behaviors that suggest they can detect the change in pressure from incoming weather. One great example is wild horses in the Outer Banks in North Carolina because they get hurricanes and wild horses, obviously, can't evacuate. So, instead, once they start to feel the pressure changes from a hurricane, they all gather together, stand in a herd, and point their butts toward the wind. And there is plenty of evidence that some large mammals head to higher ground instinctively when they detect changes in pressure.

If your dog starts to behave weird like when there's a storm coming, give them some love, but don't treat it like it's a crisis and freak them out even worse. Just let them do what they want to do, as long as it's safe. So, if your pet feels safest in an interior room, let them do that. Brody, for his part, recommends the closet.

Do you have a question to ask the meteorologists at Weather.com? Write to us at [email protected] and we’ll pick a new question each week from readers to answer.