Not quite. The Pharaoh, at the behest of the priests (who were the ones who could predict the flood) would ask the gods to cause the Nile to flood.
And they didn’t think - so far as we know - that the gods only flooded the river because the Pharaoh asked them too. The gods would make up their own minds about whether and when to flood the river. The point of the Pharaoh’s intercession was to please the gods by acknowledging their transcendent power over the flooding. And, of course, if the gods were pleased, then they were more likely to decide to arrange for a bounteous flooding.
I know when they first went into space and could then see hurricanes forming, everybody was quite glad they could predict those! It was a very welcome advance.
I knew that Almanacs had been around for a long time and, while definitely not trying to give minute by minute probabilistic updates, included weather predictions. After all, it’s not as if “windy in the Ebro Valley” takes a genius… it’s the default setting! The Almanaque de Bristol is in continuous publication since 1832, it is published in New Jersey for multiple Latin American markets and doesn’t get listed in the English Wiki entry for Almanac. The Calendario Zaragozano (link in Spanish) has been around since 1840 and its name is a reference to one which used to be published back in the 16th century.
Their Greek name turns out to be Parapegma (well, in Greek letters) and they’ve been around for… quite a while. The oldest combined other astronomic information with the kind of stuff we now call “the weather”, which after all isn’t so different from having the weather man tell us about upcoming eclipses or star showers.
Now, I’m no expert on weather forecasting; all I know is from the Wikipedia article. But from that, the Enlightenment may have been all that and a bag of chips, but all it brought to weather forecasting was the barometer. Which was useful and improved things, but not in a world-view-shattering way.
Rapid data transfer didn’t happen until the mid 1800’s and even then it started slowly and very gradually got better. Over the next century and a half, there were significant advances in theory, computers brought greatly improved modeling, and satellite sensing was another step forward in data transfer, but no single dramatic change. I also submit that anyone impressed by modern (1850+) weather prediction will have had many, many chances to be much more impressed by other aspects of modern science.
Of course. Plenty of people believe in God as the creator of the universe. If he’s capable of doing that, why wouldn’t he be capable of creating physical laws, patterns, and jillions of other things that humans discover? In fact, if he created the universe, how could he NOT have created the patterns? The patterns just show how clever God is. They don’t disprove his existence.
Well, like I said, it doesn’t take a lot to predict wind in the Ebro Valley. They weren’t trying for more accuracy that that, and succeeding in such a prediction is not confirmation bias - it’s knowledge of the weather patterns for the location, as what’s weird in most of the Ebro Valley is when the wind isn’t blowing (most because the Lleida Well is an exception). But it’s not as if people had not been used to weather predictions before weather satellites. Those run by locals based on their knowledge of local weather patterns tend to be pretty good.