Whiteout on way? We’ll just have to wait and see

SEVENTY years ago this week, the first ever televised weather forecast was broadcast on the BBC. At 5.55pm on

Jan 11, 1954, a meteorologist called George Cowling delivered a brisk four minute, 30 second bulletin, in clipped received pronunciation.

“A nice friendly affair” was what one reviewer called it, although Cowling did raise eyebrows for adopting what some deemed to be an overly informal tone at the end, urging housewives to take advantage of windy conditions to hang up the washing the following day.

The technology was somewhat elementary. To illustrate the forecasts, isobars and fronts were drawn on to charts using a quick-drying fountain pen, while sticks of charcoal were used to show the expected changes in the weather. Nowadays, of course, it is all super computers and weather models. So high-powered are the Met Office’s systems that they can process in 215 billion weather observations in a day.

But, as Cowling instinctively realised, weather forecasting should be about translating the complex into something that resonates. As I watched a BBC 10-day forecast this week, the presenter presented a scrawled mass of coloured lines representing the calculations of a European weather model and admitted it resembled a drawing by a three-year-old child.

It is reassuring that 70 years on and the weather retains an air of mystery. Next week, for example, it may dump snow across much of central England, or the whiteout may transpire to be something of a damp squib.

Woe betide the weather watcher who tries to be more exact than that. As Oliver Graham Sutton, director of the UK Meteorological Office, and the man tasked with replying to complaints over Cowling’s initial forecasts, once put it: “Meteorologists should be regarded more as an adviser rather than a prophet.”*

A flurry of snow was seen in Lenham, Kent