I’m forecasting confusion ahead in fickle climate

THIRTY YEARS ago today, people were waking up – those who had managed to sleep – to the aftermath of the worst storm to hit this country for three centuries, a storm that caused a record amount of damage and killed 19 people.

And the person who took the blame, as if it was his fault, was poor old weatherman Michael Fish who, the day before, told the nation not to worry and that rumours of a pending hurricane were unfounded, a statement he has never been allowed to forget.

As a nation, we have an inbred preoccupation with the weather; it’s the first topic of conversation, the perpetual ice-breaker (so to speak). If there were two Brits crawling across a desert towards one another, nothing would be said as they passed except “Looks like rain again” even though it didn’t.

Our meteorological predisposition comes from the fact that, in the scheme of things, we live on a very small island subject to the vagaries of the North Atlantic and the North Sea all around us and the jet stream above us. And we cling to this little rock oblivious to the fact that Mother Nature hardly even knows we are there, a point admirably illustrated by King Canute – he of the wet socks and trousers.

Every day we get up and look to the skies to see what sort of a day it will be, but it could change by the hour as one weather system after another comes rolling in off the Atlantic. But despite knowing this, we somehow still expect the Met Office to get their forecasts right whereas, really, the best we can expect of them – with any degree of accuracy – is that it will be light during the day and dark at night.

If we ever stop blaming Michael Fish for the Great Storm of 1987, we might move on to remember Admiral Robert FitzRoy for founding, in 1854, what would eventually become the Met Office. By all accounts, he was doing a pretty good job given the very limited (non-existent) technology at his disposal, but he also suffered from deep depressions (now there’s an irony) and eventually, and sadly, took his own life and has now become a sea area in the shipping forecast.

Some people might still remember the days when the BBC weather was little more than a person with a piece of chalk and a map of the UK. Over the years things moved on to magnetic weather symbols but they tended to fall off like letters at a Conservative Party conference.

Things then moved on to green screens, computer generated maps and the fruits of satellite technology that can spot a transatlantic storm before it’s even a breath of wind. But have the forecasts become more accurate? I can’t help feeling that a bunch of seaweed, or cows lying down in fields, or seagulls heading inland, would be just as reliable an indicator sometimes.

In fact, isn’t that exactly why the BBC now has a system of so-called “weather watchers” sending in beautiful photos of what the weather is doing where they live?

People think it’s all about getting their pictures on the telly, but it’s actually just a heavily disguised version of having people all around the UK stick their head out of their window and then phone the Beeb and tell them what the weather’s like.

Satellites may be able to give us the big picture, but it’s only people on the ground who can tell you what the weather is like where they are – and that might prove far more helpful a lot of the time.

At the same time the weather forecasts can get very silly. The BBC totally ignores the Republic of Ireland because, of course, no one there pays the licence fee and so, even if the transmission signal makes across the Irish Sea, the Beeb isn’t going to let them know what their weather is going to be like for free.

And yet the strapline that runs across the bottom of the screen on the BBC news channel disappears for the weather forecast in case it blocks out the north of France and yet they don’t pay the licence fee. Maybe they’re just being nice to the Channel Islands after they were treated so badly by the government during the war.

Having watched the national weather forecasts in America where they have a country 3000 miles wide to try to take into account, what the weather is going to do here in the few hours that it takes to cross the UK has to be more a matter of good luck than good science – but hats off to FitzRoy for trying, and hats blown off to Michael Fish.