New weather computer would have spared poor Michael Fish

THE Great Storm of 1987, which was infamously mis-forecast by weatherman Michael Fish, would have been spotted up to a week earlier had the Met Office’s new supercomputer been around.

Hurricane-strength winds of up to 120mph battered Britain overnight on Oct 15 and 16, killing 22 people, felling power lines and trees, closing roads, railways and schools and causing £1 billion in damage. The country was wholly unprepared for the barrage after Fish told viewers not to worry about rumours of a hurricane.

Ahead of the 30th anniversary of the storm, the Met Office has rerun its 1987 forecast to see if its supercomputer could have predicted the devastation. Experts confirmed that by the time Fish made his lunchtime announcement on Oct 15, a severe weather warning would have been issued.

The Met Office said it would have spotted the weather system up to a week ahead. Ken Mylne, head of verification, impacts and post-processing, said: “The chance of us getting caught out now is much less.”

The Met Office’s supercomputer is able to make 14,000 trillion calculations per second, compared to the four million calculations per second available in 1987. It can also run “ensemble” forecasts which allow meteorologists to see up to 50 versions of how the weather might play out.

Asked how Fish’s Wednesday forecast might have changed had he used the new computer, Met Office meteorologist Alex Deakin said: “We would certainly have been talking about a wet, windy spell and on the Monday and Tuesday there is every chance there would have been a yellow warning.”

“On the Wednesday, we would have told people it was shifting further south but to stay tuned to the forecast. By then, we would have had an amber warning out and warnings that winds were getting up to 60 or 70mph.”

Hundreds of thousands of trees, some more than 400 years old, were lost on 3,000 acres across 58 sites.

“It was a battle zone,” said gardener Alan Comb, who had just started work at Emmetts Garden in Kent. “There were trees sticking up like totem poles”.

Martin Sadler, a senior gardener at Petworth, said: “I’d never seen anything like it before. The trees came down like dominoes.”

After the storm, the National Trust planted 500,000 trees.

However, there were unexpected benefits. Toys Hill, former home of Octavia Hill, the National Trust founder, lost virtually all its trees, but with the canopy gone, light reached areas allowing clematis, honeysuckle and heather to thrive for the first time in 100 years.