For the general public, wondering whether to take a jumper, more clarity is
required. This is why, at the BBC weather centre in West London, they do
things differently. “Today’s story is thunderstorms,” declares presenter
Tomasz Schafernaker who, when I visit, is putting together the 1pm broadcast
for BBC News. His graphics come through from the Met Office, but he makes
them easier for viewers to understand. Over Birmingham, with a creative
flourish, he puts a little lightning bolt. Then he runs into one of the
cupboards that pass as BBC Weather’s TV studios, and presents, live.
Rather sweetly, the BBC weather centre has all those old familiar symbols of
cloud, rain, lightning and sun on the carpet. Outside in the hall, they have
pictures of the great weather presenters who went before, back to George
Cowling, “first weatherman, forecast officer at the Air Ministry
Meteorological Office”, from 1954. Many are shown behind glass screens with
maps on them, clutching thick marker pens. Those iconic magnets came later.
When Schafernaker enters his studio, the unmanned camera automatically adjusts
to the right height. His graphics are in the system and ready to go, and he
stands in front of a blue screen, with a clicker to go from one page to the
next. I have a go afterwards. It’s a lot harder than you might think.
Although you will often see presenters turn and indicate the map behind,
they can actually only see it in the monitors ahead. Watch the presenters
carefully, and you can often see them making a little exploratory wave
before pointing out a cloud or a patch of rain. Presenting the forecast on
BBC Breakfast, Carol Kirkwood usually can’t see the map at all. She relies
on the director hissing “Glasgow” or “Newcastle” in her ear. “The public
love the mistakes,” she says, “but you don’t want it to happen too often.”
A good pub quiz fact is that the BBC’s weather presenters tend to be employees
of the Met Office, not the BBC. Most are highly qualified. Schafernaker
studied meteorology at Reading before being trained at the Met Office.
Sitting nearby is Sarah Wilmshurst, who went to the Met Office with an MSc
in applied meteorology and climatology from Birmingham. Kirkwood is a
rarity: after a degree in commerce, she began presenting, then moved into
meteorology, rather than vice versa. She presented on the Weather Channel,
before undergoing Met Office training, which means she can read weather
charts rather than just following an autocue. “It’s an ongoing process,” she
says. “You go back now and again, to keep your hand in.”
At a local level, the BBC is beginning to trial unqualified presenters, after
giving them a basic course. They’re a little cagey about this, perhaps
because it may cause a fuss. It probably shouldn’t. Great pains are taken to
ensure that every BBC outlet sings from the same hymn sheet. Unlike their
counterparts in Exeter and Aberdeen, they would rather be consistent than
precise. It’s a sensible approach. The general public doesn’t give a hoot
about the difference between 14C and 13C, but if Ceefax says hail and the TV
says rain, people get confused. The BBC weather centre was inundated with
calls after the February earthquake. People wanted to know why they didn’t
see it coming. This seems to be the running theme in weather. People get
confused. We may smirk at the idea of Philip Avery telling Sue Barker what
scattered showers are, but they aren’t necessarily what you might think.
“Showers” are short periods of heavy rain and “scattered” means irregularly
dispersed over an area. Scattered showers are a big deal. No weather for a
picnic. This is why, for the most part, the BBC has stopped talking about
isobars and areas of pressure. We just don’t get it.
Non-comprehension came to a head during the great British floods of 2007. The
jet stream, which blasts around the world from the West (and makes it
quicker for us to fly back from New York than it is to fly out), was further
south than usual, and brought with it a system of low pressure. As a vague
and only slightly inaccurate rule, high pressure makes for relatively stable
weather, whereas low pressure means all manner of interloping wet and
blustery hell. So we got wet. And we kept getting wet. According to the Pitt
Review, which was set up in the aftermath to figure out why Britain was so
bad at dealing with this, the weather wizards saw it coming, and said so.
Yet the message didn’t get out to the public. Between them, the Met Office,
the Environment Agency, local authorities, central government, the media and
the emergency services just didn’t get it together. It wasn’t Hurricane
Katrina, but it wasn’t good, either. Sometimes things go the other way. A
couple of years ago, you might remember a Met Office warning about high
winds every second day. People stopped noticing. We are easily bored.
Fast-forward to the next set of floods, in March this year, and the situation
was much improved. Martin Powell is the manager of Lascares, a tapas bar in
Looe, Cornwall. “We had six inches of water in the kitchen,” he says. “It
came up through the drains. We get high tides a few times a year, but this
was bad. The worst for 25 years. The wind was in the wrong direction and it
came over the harbour walls.” Was he warned? “Oh yes,” he says. “In the
local paper, on the radio. Weeks ahead. We knew it was coming.” The Met
Office was pretty pleased with the floods of March. Similarly, they were
pleased with the London marathon, even though it was a washout, with many
runners squelching with every step. This is the crucial thing about
weathermen. They don’t care if the weather is bad. They only care about
making sure that the right people know.
In a curiously British way, it is almost comforting to know that our
weathermen have it harder than most. British weather is unusually
changeable, particularly in summer. As Paul Simons, The Times’ weatherman,
puts it, “We are stuck on the edge of a vast continent, pummelled from the
Atlantic, frozen from the Arctic and steamed from Europe.” Several air
masses meet above us, and bounce around. Thanks to basic physics and the way
the world turns, our prevailing winds come from the west and south west, off
the Atlantic. They fade in spring and return with a bang in early summer.
Usually, they bring frontal depressions. A front is the edge between two
masses of air, and a depression is low pressure. Extreme low pressure means
hurricanes and typhoons, as in the Tropics. Ours are usually mild, and just
bring wind and change. Still, we have a lot of them. They come in fast and
bang into each other. It’s a bunfight up there.
Is weather getting worse? Well, weathermen don’t use words like “worse”.
Theirs is not to judge. “If you warm the climate,” says Grahame, “you are
more likely to get heavier rain and violent storms.” In other words, greater
depressions. Some meteorologists already describe the summer return of the
westerly winds as the European monsoon. Exact predictions vary, but
according to the Hadley Centre, set up at the Met Office in 1990 to study
climate change, there is no debate. The climate is warming, but this is not
a moral issue, it’s just weather that needs to be predicted.
“A colleague once said to me,” says Graham Leitch, another Exeter weatherman,
“‘Wouldn’t it be great if we were 100 per cent accurate?’ And I
said, ‘No. Everybody would go on holiday on the same day. The shops would
all have ice-cream for sale and no soup.’” He’s right. For small talk, the
English would only have their dogs. The umbrella industry would collapse.
Some weeks, we might never leave the house. And Cliff Richard would never
sing. It’s better this way. Whether Des Lynam appreciates it or not.
