Historians of climate science have highlighted a shift in Cold War-era meteorology in Europe and North America from local, experiential knowledge to computer-based global modeling. My dissertation revisits this account by examining how scientific meteorology in East Asia developed through sustained engagement with vernacular knowledge and folk belief. Focusing on communities along China’s southern coast, it traces how fishers and other mobile maritime populations combined scientific expertise, generational knowledge, and folk ritual practices to cope with seasonal typhoons from the Second World War through the Cold War. In doing so, the project seeks to expand the history of Cold War science beyond the Atlantic world, and reconsiders who counts as a producer of weather and climate knowledge in 20th-century China and East Asia.