Stormwardens Theory... [WaT]

[CognitiveShadow he/him]

Rereading and in Oathbringer now. Noticed a line about the storm wardens in the scholars meeting that Renarin joins (and when Dalinar has is singular good dad moment and shows up to help Renarin feel more confident).

From Shallan’s POV, it is mentioned that the storm wardens supposedly use the blowings of the wind to foretell the future, though they are very secretive about it. Here is the quote:

Oathbringer 44: “There were even 3 storm wardens, the odd men with the long beards who liked to predict the weather. Shallan had heard that they would occasionally use the blowing of the winds to foretell the future. But they never offered such services openly.”

Could it be that they are actually getting some answers about the future and that the source is the Wind? Perhaps back then with OG odium there were ways the Wind was still able to communicate to people (through patterns of gusts or things like that)?

I think there’s a valid argument for this just being superstition cast upon an already outcast part of society that is shrouded (seemingly intentionally) in mystery. But given what we learn of the Wind in WaT, I am curious if there’s any validity to the occasional fortune telling that the storm wardens supposedly offered. Perhaps this was a way the Wind communicated with people and influence them while Rayse was suppressing her voice? Perhaps she is being suppressed again by Retribution now as well and that's why she has stopped talking again? So maybe the storm wardens play a bigger role in the back half and share some knowledge on how to prepare for Kaladin and the Heralds to return?

I posted this on Reddit and just got a lot of "they just predict the storms, not actual fortune telling", but I feel like this quote separates those two completely. It's an 'occasional' thing that they supposedly do. Could be baseless rumors and accusations by a Vorin society, but it does seem like it could be a hint at something more. And yet another early reference to the Wind being more than just pressure differentials and shifting air.

[Atlas333]

This is an interesting point I had never considered. An extra complication is that seeing the future is an ability heavily associated with odium. I could see ancient storm wardens talking to the wind and all Roshar has in the modern day is a traditional remnant that doesn't actually see the future.

[CognitiveShadow he/him]

26 minutes ago, Atlas333 said:

This is an interesting point I had never considered. An extra complication is that seeing the future is an ability heavily associated with odium. I could see ancient storm wardens talking to the wind and all Roshar has in the modern day is a traditional remnant that doesn't actually see the future.

That's more of a Vorin tradition thing though right? We know that all the shards try to look into the future and use that as a tool to guide their plans/actions. It would seem that the reason they only do this occasionally and never offer the services openly is because of how their society frowns upon anything related to future sight. 

But I agree that it could absolutely be the case that it is a lost art/practice that is loosely attempted with little to no success in modern day Roshar. Though I think it would be more fun and interesting if it turned out that they were secretly hiding a connection with one of the ancient gods of Roshar. Especially since Kalak was posing as a stormwarden when assisting Amaram - what if he was not just posing, but the stormwardens also had some within their ranks that were part of the sons of honor or their own special group that guarded some secrets over the millenia?

[Returned he/him]

The Stormwardens are a great group in which to hide someone with esoteric knowledge, like any worldhopper would have. I'm skeptical that they are actually seeing the future, though. We don't know very much about Wind, so maybe it has some ability to see into the future, but that's pretty raw speculation. Even Shallan's line in your quote is 100% rumor with no evidence of any kind-- "it's the kind of thing they do, and a service that they offer, though never to you or anyone you know so you'll never actually see it".

The mention that they "foretell the future" always seemed to me to be a combination of the esoteric, mystical air they affected along with the ability to tell when the next Highstorm would come. The setting makes it pretty clear that this is not seeing the future but rather studying the past to uncover a pattern that exists in the present and will probably persist into the future. Lirin does it as a hobby, purely a math exercise, with no Stormwarden airs or accoutrements involved.

Something that has become increasingly clear as the Cosmere has developed is that seeing the future isn't very rare, and its lack of rarity also makes it a lot less useful than it sounds. Don't let me discourage you, though-- I'm on record here as believing that futuresight in the Cosmere is all but worthless for nearly everyone, and that it's just a plot device with all other properties being secondary at best (and probably irrelevant).

Do you have any ideas on what the Stormwardens might have gained from this ability, if they indeed had and used it? I could imagine it being useful in maneuvering against the Vorin authorities, who clearly opposed the them in the past and specifically avoided anything that might hint at knowledge of the future (they don't even play poker!).

[Through The Living Ash he/him]

15 hours ago, Returned said:

The Stormwardens are a great group in which to hide someone with esoteric knowledge, like any worldhopper would have. I'm skeptical that they are actually seeing the future, though. We don't know very much about Wind, so maybe it has some ability to see into the future, but that's pretty raw speculation. Even Shallan's line in your quote is 100% rumor with no evidence of any kind-- "it's the kind of thing they do, and a service that they offer, though never to you or anyone you know so you'll never actually see it".

The mention that they "foretell the future" always seemed to me to be a combination of the esoteric, mystical air they affected along with the ability to tell when the next Highstorm would come. The setting makes it pretty clear that this is not seeing the future but rather studying the past to uncover a pattern that exists in the present and will probably persist into the future. Lirin does it as a hobby, purely a math exercise, with no Stormwarden airs or accoutrements involved.

Something that has become increasingly clear as the Cosmere has developed is that seeing the future isn't very rare, and its lack of rarity also makes it a lot less useful than it sounds. Don't let me discourage you, though-- I'm on record here as believing that futuresight in the Cosmere is all but worthless for nearly everyone, and that it's just a plot device with all other properties being secondary at best (and probably irrelevant).

Do you have any ideas on what the Stormwardens might have gained from this ability, if they indeed had and used it? I could imagine it being useful in maneuvering against the Vorin authorities, who clearly opposed the them in the past and specifically avoided anything that might hint at knowledge of the future (they don't even play poker!).

The Wind has at least some access to Fortune, as it was able to tell that the Night of Sorrows was approaching and knew that because of this, the spren would be endangered, and also knew that Kaladin would somehow be able to help this. While near the end all spren seemed to sense the coming of the Night of Sorrows, the Wind predicted it much earlier and knew far more about it. 

But also, with the Stormfather being made sort of to replace the Wind, it is possible that the Wind just has some sort of connection to the Highstorms that lets them know where they are. 

[CognitiveShadow he/him]

15 hours ago, Returned said:

We don't know very much about Wind, so maybe it has some ability to see into the future, but that's pretty raw speculation.

Ashkaloda's response below shows a wealth of evidence pointing to the Wind being able to look into the future with accuracy

9 minutes ago, Ashkaloda said:

The Wind has at least some access to Fortune, as it was able to tell that the Night of Sorrows was approaching and knew that because of this, the spren would be endangered, and also knew that Kaladin would somehow be able to help this. While near the end all spren seemed to sense the coming of the Night of Sorrows, the Wind predicted it much earlier and knew far more about it. 

Agreed - we also see the way the Wind exists within the Spiritual Realm and can communicate with Dalinar and Navani, referencing things happening in the real world at that time. So she clearly has active connection to the SR and use that to look at the possibilities in the future. She also was shaping Kaladin for a loooooong time to get him where she needed him to be to form the new Oathpact. 

15 hours ago, Returned said:

Something that has become increasingly clear as the Cosmere has developed is that seeing the future isn't very rare, and its lack of rarity also makes it a lot less useful than it sounds. Don't let me discourage you, though-- I'm on record here as believing that futuresight in the Cosmere is all but worthless for nearly everyone, and that it's just a plot device with all other properties being secondary at best (and probably irrelevant).

I agree that it isn't the most useful thing in the Cosmere, but that is primarily because the people who access futuresight are often using it as a tool to combat agaisnt people who also can access futuresight. So they counteract eachother and it gets tricky. The characters are in a contest to see who can more accurately predict the future or who can for correctly predict how their enemy will try to counter their original plans. "I know that you know that I know that you know that I know...." - that's kind of the battle. And some are much more skilled/accurate than others. Preservation was able to outmaneuver Ruin. Cultivation was hoping to outmaneuver Odium, and suceeded in supplanting Rayse with Taravangian... but it turned out that was not better.

15 hours ago, Returned said:

Do you have any ideas on what the Stormwardens might have gained from this ability, if they indeed had and used it? I could imagine it being useful in maneuvering against the Vorin authorities, who clearly opposed the them in the past and specifically avoided anything that might hint at knowledge of the future (they don't even play poker!).

Right, I could see it even being something like a secret society within the Stormwardens. Kind of like how the Skybreakers never actually went away and just kept themselves hidden. This secret group could have been actively working for or serving the Wind, using previously defined methods of communication through wind gusts and tools, maybe even fabrials.

So I could see it playing out as merely a ouiji board or dowsing rod type of situation where they ask questions of the Wind and then act based on the answers they get through gusts. That would certainly line up with the soothsaying or fortunetelling nature. I lean more to this kind of interaction than I do towards the idea of getting actual visions of the future from the Wind, simply because the way they describe it is using the gusts of the wind to fortell the future.

[Returned he/him]

4 hours ago, Ashkaloda said:

The Wind has at least some access to Fortune, as it was able to tell that the Night of Sorrows was approaching and knew that because of this, the spren would be endangered, and also knew that Kaladin would somehow be able to help this. While near the end all spren seemed to sense the coming of the Night of Sorrows, the Wind predicted it much earlier and knew far more about it. 

But also, with the Stormfather being made sort of to replace the Wind, it is possible that the Wind just has some sort of connection to the Highstorms that lets them know where they are. 

You don't need Fortune to have an opinion about the future-- mundane attention and reasoning are sufficient for that, though obviously not necessarily accurate. If you hold a stone up at shoulder height and then let go, you probably have a strong sense of what will happen (the stone will fall), and you'd be correct, no magic needed. Honor's death and Odium's unceasing efforts were pretty good indicators of the shape of things to come, and the Wind's omnipresence (?) would allow it to collect a lot of information in more ordinary ways, like hearing death rattles. I've only read through WaT once so please forgive me if I'm forgetting more specific instances of the depth of Wind's knowledge (which I likely am).

My point is only that futuresight isn't the only way that characters in the Cosmere know about things or hatch plans to influence the future, yet there is a frequent assumption here on the Shard that almost everyone of note has access to it and uses it, and that it is relevant (if not decisive) in basically all cases. This habit is what I read into your lattermost point: because one thing is conceptually sort of true, kind of, maybe there's some sort of connection that thing has to another thing which, if you squint, might fit in with some other thing which otherwise seems totally unrelated because it isn't impossible. I mean, maybe! But it's a thin argument.

The point about cultivating Kaladin so early on is a pretty good one and well-taken. I will make one large distinction, however: access to Fortune doesn't necessarily grant knowledge of the future but instead puts individuals in positions where outcomes they favor are more likely (see WoBs on how Feruchemical Fortune works). We know almost nothing about the Wind and its properties, so one guess is as good as another, but it strikes me as a large assumption that the Wind is tapping futuresight. Fortune might not even be the mechanism at all-- it's every bit as possible that Kaladin is Connected to the Wind, which drew them together and not some scheme. But you have convinced me that there is some reason to speculate in the direction of the Wind having an ability like you describe.

Could we tease out what might differentiate one possibility from another? Like, if the Wind had specific foreknowledge, what might we see it do that would be different from accessing Fortune like a spinner might? And how would both of those differ from a non-magical plan an informed being might concoct?

 

3 hours ago, CognitiveShadow said:

I agree that it isn't the most useful thing in the Cosmere, but that is primarily because the people who access futuresight are often using it as a tool to combat agaisnt people who also can access futuresight. So they counteract eachother and it gets tricky. The characters are in a contest to see who can more accurately predict the future or who can for correctly predict how their enemy will try to counter their original plans. "I know that you know that I know that you know that I know...." - that's kind of the battle. And some are much more skilled/accurate than others. Preservation was able to outmaneuver Ruin. Cultivation was hoping to outmaneuver Odium, and suceeded in supplanting Rayse with Taravangian... but it turned out that was not better.

No, it isn't. Acting on knowledge of the future changes the future and can cause problems with others' futuresight even if you're not directly opposing anyone, or are even aware of someone else. So "the future" isn't a fixed thing when other people are constantly changing it, which they are, which means that "knowing" it isn't a well defined state in the first place. And as soon as there is interference your futuresight becomes incredibly unreliable, at which point it's insane to have futuresight be the basis for your whole plan. Like, if you have a test coming up and could study for it or you could try to divine the right answers, it might seem like divining is the way to go. But if the divining isn't reliable then it's a worse idea to do that than to just study in a more conventional way.

But at a broader, narrative level futuresight is either devastatingly effective or basically worthless and we, the readers, can't know which until the end. So when it suits the needs of the plot, a character using futuresight is completely unbeatable and can't fail. Unless the plot needs them to be defeated, and then the futuresight is inherently unreliable and gains no advantage at all. As a result, knowing a character has access to futuresight provides literally no information and is not different than any other approach a character might take to address a problem. Mistborn did a really good job of playing this out in an interesting way: Vin, Shan, Zane, and Yomen showed a lot of angles on the mechanism of seeing into the future and the specifics of the reliability/necessity/utility of futuresight were plot-relevant on the page.

Later Cosmere works have been less impressive to me in that regard: Cultivation and Rayse futuresight-ed their way through incredibly convoluted plans which they could execute only because they had futuresight and seemed to rely on nothing else, but in the end they didn't future-see well enough so they failed in their ambitions anyways. Some advantage that was! And Taravangian got everything he wanted without any supernatural foreknowledge. Futuresight just fails until there is some hard-to-resolve situation that can't be made to fit any other way, and then it just works.

Shards, at least, should know enough about futuresight's problems to not rely on it as much as they seem to, but keeping every other element of their schemes and reasoning a secret from the readers (which is very defensible, narratively) leaves us with an impression that futuresight is a lot better, more relied upon, and more powerful than events in-text reveal it to be. The diegesis just doesn't match the exigesis.

3 hours ago, CognitiveShadow said:

Right, I could see it even being something like a secret society within the Stormwardens. Kind of like how the Skybreakers never actually went away and just kept themselves hidden. This secret group could have been actively working for or serving the Wind, using previously defined methods of communication through wind gusts and tools, maybe even fabrials.

So I could see it playing out as merely a ouiji board or dowsing rod type of situation where they ask questions of the Wind and then act based on the answers they get through gusts. That would certainly line up with the soothsaying or fortunetelling nature. I lean more to this kind of interaction than I do towards the idea of getting actual visions of the future from the Wind, simply because the way they describe it is using the gusts of the wind to fortell the future.

That's a pretty interesting idea, especially if the Stormwardens doing the diviniation don't and can't know if they're receiving real information or not. Do you imagine this as something that will come up again in the future (the secret society continues, and continues to gain in the future whatever advantages they historically have), or just some extra richness in Roshar's past? I don't have a good sense of when the Stormwardens became a thing, but we may not have many PoV characters who would have existed in the appropriate timeframe. Maybe Navani would have personally observed some of it, or Renarin has some of the mysteries explained to him while the Stormwardens were trying to recruit him?

Edited June 11, 2025 by Returned

[Through The Living Ash he/him]

18 minutes ago, Returned said:

You don't need Fortune to have an opinion about the future-- mundane attention and reasoning are sufficient for that, though obviously not necessarily accurate. If you hold a stone up at shoulder height and then let go, you probably have a strong sense of what will happen (the stone will fall), and you'd be correct, no magic needed. Honor's death and Odium's unceasing efforts were pretty good indicators of the shape of things to come, and the Wind's omnipresence (?) would allow it to collect a lot of information in more ordinary ways, like hearing death rattles. I've only read through WaT once so please forgive me if I'm forgetting more specific instances of the depth of Wind's knowledge (which I likely am).

My point is only that futuresight isn't the only way that characters in the Cosmere know about things or hatch plans to influence the future, yet there is a frequent assumption here on the Shard that almost everyone of note has access to it and uses it, and that it is relevant (if not decisive) in basically all cases. This habit is what I read into your lattermost point: because one thing is conceptually sort of true, kind of, maybe there's some sort of connection that thing has to another thing which, if you squint, might fit in with some other thing which otherwise seems totally unrelated because it isn't impossible. I mean, maybe! But it's a thin argument.

The point about cultivating Kaladin so early on is a pretty good one and well-taken. I will make one large distinction, however: access to Fortune doesn't necessarily grant knowledge of the future but instead puts individuals in positions where outcomes they favor are more likely (see WoBs on how Feruchemical Fortune works). We know almost nothing about the Wind and its properties, so one guess is as good as another, but it strikes me as a large assumption that the Wind is tapping futuresight. Fortune might not even be the mechanism at all-- it's every bit as possible that Kaladin is Connected to the Wind, which drew them together and not some scheme. But you have convinced me that there is some reason to speculate in the direction of the Wind having an ability like you describe.

Could we tease out what might differentiate one possibility from another? Like, if the Wind had specific foreknowledge, what might we see it do that would be different from accessing Fortune like a spinner might? And how would both of those differ from a non-magical plan an informed being might concoct?

 

No, it isn't. Acting on knowledge of the future changes the future and can cause problems with others' futuresight even if you're not directly opposing anyone, or are even aware of someone else. So "the future" isn't a fixed thing when other people are constantly changing it, which they are, which means that "knowing" it isn't a well defined state in the first place. And as soon as there is interference your futuresight becomes incredibly unreliable, at which point it's insane to have futuresight be the basis for your whole plan. Like, if you have a test coming up and could study for it or you could try to divine the right answers, it might seem like divining is the way to go. But if the divining isn't reliable then it's a worse idea to do that than to just study in a more conventional way.

But at a broader, narrative level futuresight is either devastatingly effective or basically worthless and we, the readers, can't know which until the end. So when it suits the needs of the plot, a character using futuresight is completely unbeatable and can't fail. Unless the plot needs them to be defeated, and then the futuresight is inherently unreliable and gains no advantage at all. As a result, knowing a character has access to futuresight provides literally no information and is not different than any other approach a character might take to address a problem. Mistborn did a really good job of playing this out in an interesting way: Vin, Shan, Zane, and Yomen showed a lot of angles on the mechanism of seeing into the future and the specifics of the reliability/necessity/utility of futuresight were plot-relevant on the page.

Later Cosmere works have been less impressive to me in that regard: Cultivation and Rayse futuresight-ed their way through incredibly convoluted plans which they could execute only because they had futuresight and seemed to rely on nothing else, but in the end they didn't future-see well enough so they failed in their ambitions anyways. Some advantage that was! And Taravangian got everything he wanted without any supernatural foreknowledge. Futuresight just fails until there is some hard-to-resolve situation that can't be made to fit any other way, and then it just works.

Shards, at least, should know enough about futuresight's problems to not rely on it as much as they seem to, but keeping every other element of their schemes and reasoning a secret from the readers (which is very defensible, narratively) leaves us with an impression that futuresight is a lot better, more relied upon, and more powerful than events in-text reveal it to be. The diegesis just doesn't match the exigesis.

That's a pretty interesting idea, especially if the Stormwardens doing the diviniation don't and can't know if they're receiving real information or not. Do you imagine this as something that will come up again in the future (the secret society continues, and continues to gain in the future whatever advantages they historically have), or just some extra richness in Roshar's past? I don't have a good sense of when the Stormwardens became a thing, but we may not have many PoV characters who would have existed in the appropriate timeframe. Maybe Navani would have personally observed some of it, or Renarin has some of the mysteries explained to him while the Stormwardens were trying to recruit him?

Fortune, as an aspect of Investiture, is probably the least understood, but it can manifest in many different ways. I find your stone analogy simplistic. It is not one action taken and then resolved; it is millions of actions all being taken and trying to guess at the answer. If you threw a hundred stones at each other at once, it would be nearly impossible to predict where each would land. It is stated clearly that the Wind (and other spren) do not think that the Night of Sorrows will happen based on information given to them, but "sense" that something bad is coming. Do you not think that if the outcome could be determined by merely knowing of an imminent clash and observing Death Rattles, Cultivation and Odium would not have been able to predict it? I agree that futuresight is overused, but it seems obvious in the case of the Wind that they are directly accessing it. How else would they know, "Oh, Kaladin needs to come to Shinovar, away from the action, and reforge the Oathpact because all of the spren will be in danger due to the forming of Retribution and the coming of the Night of Sorrows"? It was more subtle than that, but still. I would conjecture that the Wind's access to the future seems to be similar to Hoid's: they can sense when important things are happening and generally what and who needs to be where, but cannot literally see the future. 

Back to the topic of the Stormwardens, it seems unlikely to me now in reflection that the Wind would use Fortune to predict a highstorm, and it is much more likely that they simply know where the highstorm is. 

[Returned he/him]

1 hour ago, Ashkaloda said:

Fortune, as an aspect of Investiture, is probably the least understood, but it can manifest in many different ways. [1] I find your stone analogy simplistic. It is not one action taken and then resolved; it is millions of actions all being taken and trying to guess at the answer. If you threw a hundred stones at each other at once, it would be nearly impossible to predict where each would land. It is stated clearly that the Wind (and other spren) do not think that the Night of Sorrows will happen based on information given to them, but "sense" that something bad is coming. [2] Do you not think that if the outcome could be determined by merely knowing of an imminent clash and observing Death Rattles, Cultivation and Odium would not have been able to predict it? I agree that futuresight is overused, [3] but it seems obvious in the case of the Wind that they are directly accessing it. [4] How else would they know, "Oh, Kaladin needs to come to Shinovar, away from the action, and reforge the Oathpact because all of the spren will be in danger due to the forming of Retribution and the coming of the Night of Sorrows"? It was more subtle than that, but still. [5] I would conjecture that the Wind's access to the future seems to be similar to Hoid's: they can sense when important things are happening and generally what and who needs to be where, but cannot literally see the future. 

I bolded a couple of sections to avoid filling my reply with quote boxes, hopefully it's clear enough and still gets the major points covered. As an aside, did you find this formatting helpful? The bolded sections are addressed by number:

1. Yes, the stone analogy is simplistic, which was the point: it's an accessible, digestible example of future sight not being the only way to predict a future occurrence. That was its only function, and predictions being more complex to reliably make is irrelevant to that point. I'm 100% ready to accept that some scheme might have too many moving parts to be predicted without something to assist, and futuresight certainly can be that thing. But not necessarily the only thing that could help-- a powerful enough computer can track a more complex physical system than an unaided person but doesn't draw from the future to do it. And if the linchpin of your plan is futuresight, then all of my points above become central: it's very unreliable to use as the linchpin of your schemes.

2. I'm not sure I'm parsing this correctly (is there one too many negatives? Please let me know if I've misinterpreted), but Odium and Cultivation almost certainly did predict it. Unless there is an argument that Moelach has better access to futuresight than a Shard (or at least those two particular Shards), then presumably they already know everything Moelach has revealed and a great deal more besides. My suggestion in the previous post was less focused on that, though, than that someone could look at the resources, knowledge, and power on Odium's side vs. Honor's side (to be reductive in the groupings) and conclude that, yeah, Odium was probably going to win. And, therefore, that things he was pursuing and could achieve in victory would also come to pass.

3. Here we may be talking past each other. When I say "futuresight" I mean specific information on what will come to pass, like what era 1 atium grants. This is different from what Hoid does (and presumably what a spinner does) specifically because futuresight provides that information. It's the difference between "I know the outcomes of these events, and will fold those outcomes into my plans to gain an advantage" and "I'll somehow be closer to some of my goals in some way if I do X, so I'll do X and hope for the best". Importantly, the latter seems less prone to interference from others seeing the future (maybe because it's so much less specific?). There seem to be some clear differences in how individuals access and work with Fortune, and what I am suggesting is that if the Wind is accessing Fortune it is doing so differently than how we saw Rayse do it in his demonstration to Taravangian.

4. My suggestion is that they wouldn't know all of that, and that they didn't. The Wind's whole thing could just as easily have been "Odium will kill me, others might not, so I'll back anyone I can talk to that might oppose Odium", for example. And was it the Wind that instructed Kaladin to go to Shinovar with Szeth? Apologies again, I've only read WaT once and it was a while ago so my memories might be fuzzy on specifics and this item seems hard to look up quickly. Other possibilities that don't require much specificity about future knowledge also exist, like "if Kaladin stays here he'll probably die, and since he's the last person who could potentially help me survive I'd like to avoid that, so I'll try to get him to go anywhere else". If we want to conclude that the Wind did have enough access to Fortune, via any means and in any form, to develop such a complex plan based on that access, we're left with the problem that most of the beings we've seen use their own access in pursuit of their own goals have failed. Or at least failed according to what we currently know about their plans and the outcomes. That would suggest that the Wind not only has access but has the best access, enough to outdo every other Fortune-user including those actively opposed to what the Wind was trying to achieve. That is a much, much stronger statement.

5. If the Wind has access to Fortune at all (which, again, I agree is possible) and that access is similar to Hoid's or a spinner's (also possible), then I don't see that it would be useful for a Stormwarden's fortune telling, which is the subject of the thread. It's not clear to me that Hoid can use his ability to determine where other people need to be, but we've already seen variations on lots of other powers. Maybe the Wind's version is one such variation, but even then unless communication between Wind and Stormwarden is really, really good, how would they make use of it? Communication on that level would indicate to me that the Wind is a much more active player in Rosharan events than the book suggests.

In any case, we know from Lirin's hobby that math is sufficient to predict a large majority of Highstorms. So I don't think that the Stormwardens were using magic to to make their predictions, and there's no evidence at all that they ever did or could. That doesn't mean that they couldn't be using magic in other ways to other purposes