Growing scientific understandings of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation phenomenon have inspired a fruitful area of historical scholarship to explore its violent past, with important work by Richard Grove, Mike Davis and most recently, Don Garden. Their studies provide a foundation for this paper in which I will examine the scientific research of the emerging meteorological communities in India and Australia in the late nineteenth century. In India, the first director of the Indian Meteorological Department, Henry Blanford, and in Australia, colonial meteorologists Charles Todd and Henry Russell, attempted to identify weather patterns in order to prepare long-term forecasts. Each sought to predict the onset of atmospheric changes that could produce catastrophic consequences, and to overcome their environmental anxieties about apparently volatile climates. Engaging in imperial networks of intellectual exchange, accelerated by telegraphy, these meteorologists in India and Australia shared and compared meteorological data in order to identify the larger weather patterns at work. The aims of this paper are twofold: firstly, to contextualise the collaboration of Indian and Australian meteorologists in relation to the developing scientific and professional study of meteorology in the metropole; and secondly, to situate their research in the nascent scientific communities of India and Australia in the late nineteenth century. This exploration of Indian and Australian meteorological research at the global, transnational and local scales will provide insights into the competition for climate knowledge and scientific authority, and the political and intellectual consequences of these struggles.