Hurricanes and Heatwaves: The Highs and Lows of British Weather Timeshift

Famously, the British weather is a national obsession.

Could you give me a wind speed and direction, please?

Five gusting seven from the west.

For some, it provides vital information for the day ahead.

..Cromarty, Forth.

For millions of others, the forecast is a little piece of prediction

that can make us smile...

or frown...

She heard that there's a hurricane on the way.

If you're watching, don't worry, there isn't.

This is Britain.

This is what we normally call bad weather.

Forecasting the weather is complicated.

It may never be possible to make perfect predictions.

It doesn't comb its hair and polish its shoes.

It doesn't do what it's supposed to.

British weather is very complicated.

-The weather never stands still, you know.

-I don't suppose it does.

This is the story of the weather itself

and about some of the people who have forecast it

and those who depend on it.

Here's a gale warning. Attention all shipping.

The Met Office issued the following gale warning to shipping

at 0450 GMT today.

There have been weather forecasts

since the earliest days of broadcasting.

The shipping forecast began on radio in 1924...

The gale is likely to be severe on the south-west coasts

and in the English Channel.

..followed in 1936 by the first television forecasts,

a disembodied hand drawing isobars on a map.

But the next major advance in presenting the weather

was not brought about by new broadcasting technology.

It was the weather itself that made it happen.

Several key weather events at the beginning of the 1950s

soaked into the national psyche.

The Lynmouth flood disaster of 1952 took 34 lives

and devastated a Devon community.

The great storm swept away all our boats,

and as we watched further we saw a row of cottages near the river

and the flashes of lightning because it was dark by this time,

in the flashes we saw these houses fold up like a pack of cards.

They were swept out with the river with the agonising screams

of some of the local inhabitants, who I knew very well.

It began to be asked if the damage could have been prevented.

The following year three million people attending

the Queen's Coronation got a right royal soaking,

something they could have been better prepared for with a little forewarning.

Then it started to rain,

but the thousands didn't give in. Somehow the wet and the cold

made them even more determined to stay on,

to hold on to the places they had so diligently sought out.

The lines of newcomers never stopped.

They all made the best of it.

Up went the umbrellas, on went the raincoats,

and under the shelter of blankets and newspapers they stuck it out.

And most devastating of all, that same year,

a freak storm tide hit the East coast of England

resulting in some of the worst flooding the country has ever seen.

January 31st this year, the east coast of England.

The sea wall was breached in over 1,000 places, from the East Riding

right down to Kent.

More than 20,000 houses were flooded.

The total cost of the damage - about £50 million.

More than 300 people died, there was thousands of homes destroyed

because of the weather, and no-one really saw it coming.

They didn't see it coming in time, because as places were being flooded

on the east coast, the phone lines were down,

so no-one could even ring ahead to people further down the coast

and say "There's a big storm coming, you want to get out."

But very soon the whole nation was asking one question.

In the face of growing criticism, the BBC responded

with the help of the Met Office.

Televisions were now part of life.

20 million viewers had tuned in to watch the Coronation.

It was the ideal medium for weather forecasts

but they needed to be more engaging.

What the weather needed was a face.

Someone to tell the audience, night after night,

what the weather was going to do the next day.

In 1954, a year before the first news presenters appeared on screen,

the BBC appointed 32-year-old George Cowling from the Met Office

as their first weather forecaster.

At 7.55pm on Monday, January 11th, 1954,

Cowling prepared for his debut live broadcast.

As a Met Office man, he had to travel across London

to the Lime Grove studios with a large bundle of rolled-up

weather charts that he'd drawn himself.

With a long five minutes to fill,

Cowling decided to ad lib a little.

Something which didn't go down too well with the Met Office.

George Cowling got into a little bit of hot water

when he ended it by saying tomorrow would be a good day

to hang out the washing. Nothing like this has ever been said

on British TV before.

It went down a storm with the national press

but that didn't impress his employer.

He was rebuked by the Met Office for stepping outside his brief.

He was not doing what he was tasked to do, which was simply to give

a synoptic picture of the weather over the next few hours.

Cowling was not the first meteorologist

to feel the wrath of the Met Office.

Founded in 1854 by the Board of Trade,

it was an organisation that prided itself

on its scientific credentials.

Its first director was Robert Fitzroy

who was already famous. He'd come back from the voyage of the Beagle.

He was Darwin's ship's commander on the Beagle,

but he'd always been interested in weather.

He felt that if you had a network of observers

stationed around the coasts,

you could track what we would now call weather systems,

and he was right.

Fitzroy began to imagine he could offer public weather forecasts.

In 1861, he issues the first newspaper weather forecast,

which as it happens was correct.

This was 1st August, 1861, and he said -

it was a very short bulletin, very vague, but he said -

there would be a moderate westerly wind and it would be fine.

He was absolutely right.

Now in some ways, in retrospect, he should have stopped there.

But Fitzroy didn't stop there.

He continued issuing unauthorised newspaper forecasts

which were wrong more often than they were right.

They were hopelessly inaccurate. He didn't have enough observers.

He didn't have enough data and he, sort of, rushed it.

Fitzroy tried to limit the damage of getting weather predictions wrong

by inventing the term "weather forecast".

He hoped this emphasised that he was dealing in probabilities

and not hard facts.

But, for the Victorians, inaccurate weather forecasts

were too much like the black art of prophecy.

The newspaper weather forecasts were discontinued

and Fitzroy's reputation was in tatters.

Pressures of work, combined with this very public rebuke,

and an underlying depressive illness, led to his suicide in 1865.

The investigation into that suicide, it was a huge story

and it was almost the Victorian equivalent

of the death of David Kelly.

DOOR CREAKS

Fitzroy's death cast a shadow over weather forecasting.

There were no more newspaper forecasts for another decade.

And when they did begin again in 1875,

the science of meteorology had begun a period of change

that would revolutionise forecasting.

The invention of isobars,

which are lines of equal pressure drawn on weather maps,

changed how weather was visualised.

And in the 20th century, the introduction of wireless telegraphy

made it easier to collect weather readings.

This, for the first time, made it possible for data,

collected in different places to be delivered to a central

organising point, immediately.

This was the key to, sort of, scientific weather forecasting.

The science of meteorology continued to improve and, by the 1950s,

more accurate weather readings meant more confident weather forecasts.

The basis of our method is to look at the month of November

that we've just had and then examine our records

for the past 90 years to see if we can find a similar occasion.

When we've located one, we look at the December which followed

and this gives us one clue for the coming month.

The Met Office was at the cutting edge of forecasting.

An associated trough of low pressure will later move

south-east across Scotland into Northern Ireland and England.

It was the obvious body to supply the BBC with weather forecasts

and the meteorologists to present them.

Each one facing the daily challenge of correctly predicting

what the weather will do and broadcasting that to the public.

The cloud will soon start to thicken and then the rain,

which is already over Northern Ireland, will move eastwards

into Western Scotland and North West England and then to remain...

For some, knowing with any certainly what the weather is about to do,

would make life much easier.

Tomorrow I'm getting married.

And, I'm really, really hoping for good weather.

But we can't really guarantee anything.

I have been planning this wedding for a year

so it's a long time in the making.

And we've been checking the weather all week,

everything stops for the weather forecast, really.

Everyone has to be quiet, you know, no-one answers the phone.

You just kind of sit there and take it all in.

It looks like it's, kind of, a mixture of rain and sun,

which, kind of, isn't that bad

but it depends when it rains, I guess.

My mum has been quite neurotic about the weather for the weekend.

She has been checking it every opportunity.

Erm, yeah, she's been a little bit over the top about it.

At the moment, I can see the sun breaking through here

which is lovely, casting some lovely shadows.

A gentle breeze, the weeping willow is just moving beautifully.

It does make a difference but the wedding will go ahead,

come rain, come shine.

THUNDER CRASHES

Last night the weather took a turn for the worst.

There was a massive clap of thunder, a flash of lightning

and I was really, really scared.

I was just like, "Oh, it's my wedding tomorrow

"and I can just hear the rain pouring down."

At the moment, it doesn't look too bad

but it's that kind of weather that's threatening to rain a bit.

It could go either way.

Oh...

Is it too early?

Hurray!

I was prepared for rain so it was the nicest surprise, ever,

to have the sun on the big day.

APPLAUSE

To be able to look out of the windows where we were being married

and just see the lakes and the grass

and the gardens in such beautiful sunlight. It was amazing.

This is BBC television...

WIND HOWLS

The wind was so cold that the sea froze on the Essex coast.

The weather forecasters did not have much good news to impart

at the beginning of the 1960s.

By the time this blizzard had finally blown itself out,

200 main roads were impassable and 95,000 miles of roads

were snowbound.

The big freeze of 1962-3 lasted three months

and was the coldest winter since 1740.

After five days battling, milkroundsmen

had to take the day off from exhaustion

and 15,000 London housewives went without milk.

A new face was introduced to the weather line-up

at the end of this cold snap.

Hello there, and if you got wet today,

well, you were decidedly unlucky.

Bert Foord began his BBC career in 1963

delivering simple, instructive forecasts.

..the British Isles but the cold front fairly lethargic,

quite slow-moving, eastwards.

As a Met Office employee of 16 years standing,

Bert Foord was more civil servant than television presenter.

..just moving across south-eastern districts.

When the Met Office was founded in the 1850s,

it was very much part of the military wing of government.

Met Office employees are effectively MoD employees

and they hold ranks and pension arrangements equivalent

to ranks and pension arrangements in the Armed Forces.

..on this front, otherwise dry and fairly mild.

Now over to the National summary chart.

By now, the weather maps were professionally produced

and the forecaster did not need his crayon.

The weather was an established part of the television schedule

and complaints about the weather, a part of the forecaster's life.

Hello, weather centre?

Well, Bert, I think it's the general opinion of most citizens

that weather forecasting is not an exact science.

Do people ring up and complain and threaten to sue

and all the rest of it?

Well, yes, certainly.

We would expect to have the complaint put back to us

and in fact, if only to explain the reason for the error.

This was a decade of mind-blowing changes in the science of the skies.

Computers arrived at the Met Office

and now mathematical equations were used to make forecasts.

It was computer-generated equations

that enabled meteorologist Edward Lorenz to develop

one of the big ideas of the 20th century.

Chaos theory, which says that weather is totally unpredictable.

The chaos theory, as applied to weather, you know,

man stands on a stage, drops a golf ball,

it lands in the same place,

drops a piece of paper, it never lands in the same place,

it flutters around.

The science of meteorology is the piece of paper.

Suddenly forecasters had to accept the idea

that any imperfections in their weather data, however small,

would eventually lead to huge errors down the line.

Ultimately, what it meant is that no weather forecast

can ever be perfect.

Any error that we have in unusual conditions will always limit

the accuracy of our forecasts, in the future.

That's popularly known as this idea of a butterfly

flapping its wings in Brazil causing a tornado in Texas.

Five... Four... Three...

Two... One...

Zero!

It wasn't the only new way of looking at the weather.

The first weather satellites were launched,

sending back images of the Earth's atmosphere

with the weather visible in a new and exciting way.

That was really important to meteorologists to get this

very large, global overview of what was going on,

but they'd only been able to see by plotting things like maps

of isobars, or measurements from weather balloons to that point.

These images were a revelation.

Suddenly the entire world's weather was visible to the forecaster.

Since we've had satellites, no-one has missed any tropical

cyclones, any hurricanes over that period.

Before if a tropical cyclone didn't hit land, we won't aware of it.

If it didn't affect any shipping, we didn't know it existed.

It enabled us to do much more detailed study,

I suppose, in a way, the general public has perhaps been

more aware of that global perspective, as well.

# Where are the next of kin?

# To the wayward wind... #

The global perspective is one thing

but weather is a local business and, in Britain, rain is never far away.

For decades, the umbrella has been an essential piece of kit.

So perhaps it's surprising how little we value

this humble piece of weather proofing.

There will be some showers, here and there developing.

So far, they have been occurring in Western Scotland

and parts of Ireland, too.

They could occur in other districts.

At London Transport's Lost Property Office,

umbrellas have been filling the shelves for decades.

If you've lost an individual item,

you think there might be a few dozen,

but we get on average between 1,100 to 1,300 items

of property every day.

That's, you know, 100 mobile phones every day.

It's 300 books, bags, travel tickets, everyday.

Last year we had just over 12,000 umbrellas came through to us.

Every one that arrives here is labelled and stored

in the vaults for three months, waiting to be claimed.

When you had that spell of bad weather,

it's really easy to tell within a space of a week,

your umbrella stocks can go up by 1,000, quite easily.

You can almost relate that back to the week or two weeks

where the weather was inclement.

Of the 12,000 umbrellas that arrive here annually,

only about 300 are reunited with their original owners,

the rest are sold, or donated to charity.

You can pick what season it is, based on the type of property

we have coming through. This summer was a perfect example.

We had one of the largest heatwaves that London has had in a long time.

We are preparing, right now, the beginning of autumn,

for the onslaught of the gloves.

By the 1970s, the weather forecast was in glorious Technicolor.

Good afternoon, for most parts of the country,

it's another rather cold day with showers.

And Britain's first weather woman, Barbara Edwards,

had arrived in front of the cameras.

With the radio, one hasn't had to worry about what one's wearing,

nobody sees you. This is quite a change.

But you are giving your wardrobe some careful thought?

Oh, I certainly am, yes.

But her arrival was eclipsed by some other new kids on the block.

The '70s saw an influx of new male weather forecasting talent.

Amongst them were Bill Giles...

Ian McCaskill...

Hello, there you are.

..and Michael Fish.

There we are, I think that'll hold. Thank you very much.

They soon became household names.

For though each of them had served for many years in the backrooms

of the Met Office, they all took to screen life with relish.

Well, I said the weather is very changeable

and one look at my weather chart will show you why.

Good evening. A much quieter look to the weather,

especially after the gales of last night.

Indeed, I think most places will probably have a fine and dry night,

if rather a chilly one.

There will be one or two showers coming through,

chiefly in north-western parts.

Between them, they had more front than the weather map.

And it was the weather map that was next in line for a makeover.

As the day goes on, I think you're going to find these showers

will tend to become heavy...

Zippy new magnetic symbols came some new technical challenges.

..fairly thundery with some...

Oh, dear, these BLEEP! Let's do it again.

What I think is likely to happen, is these frontal systems...

These front men of weather science appeared night after night

on prime time television.

Unsurprisingly, their jumpers, ties and facial hair

became the stuff of everyday gossip.

People would tune into the BBC weather forecast

to see what jumper Michael Fish was wearing.

It seemed frivolous, you know.

It seemed a kind of jokey way of absolving yourself

the fact that your forecast wasn't always right.

"It doesn't matter because I'm a joker wearing a nice jumper."

But it was a weather event that really made them news.

The devastating drought of 1976 seared the weather

into the nation's consciousness.

This country is now in one of the worst periods of drought

since records began 200 years ago.

Lasting from May until August,

the drought put the country into a state of emergency.

People needed the forecast in a way they never had before.

The anticyclone there looks fairly well anchored now

and that's going to continue to keep the dry,

warm weather running in southern parts of the country.

We all know that our taste in food depends upon the weather.

For some, a long, hot summer is good for business.

Luca's ice cream parlour in Musselburgh,

on the east coast of Scotland, has been counting on good weather

since 1908.

I watch the weather forecast every single morning

before I come to work. I'm up at six in the morning

and that's the first thing I do,

TV on, weather forecast so that I've enough idea

what my day is going to be like and what uniforms we are going to need.

It gives us a rough idea of how busy we expect we're going to be.

We can be in here for nine hours

and never see the end of the queue till we walk past it going home.

The queues are frightening, they're really frightening.

Luca's manufacture their own ice cream.

Each 100 gallon batch contains milk, sugar, double cream

and 25kgs of butter.

As far as flavours go, the latest trend is Nutella ice cream.

We used to sell a lot of coffee but for some reason,

nobody wants coffee ice cream now or there's very little.

Nutella, mint chocolate chip

and we do another one called toffee fudgy wudgy,

which is probably one of our best sellers, not to forget the sorbets.

Irn Bru sorbet is also a Scottish thing.

So at nine o'clock this morning, I think,

the cloud will be in this position

with just some little bits of fine rain,

a bit of sea fog and a bit of cloud.

12 o'clock, looking like that.

Three o'clock in the afternoon, sweltering hot with patchy cloud.

Six o'clock, an isolated thunderstorm as there was yesterday.

# Pump up the volume Pump up the volume

# Pump up the volume Dance, dance... #

Into the 1980s, television forecasts embraced the computer age.

Now it's time to get the mouse out of its cage. This is the mouse.

It's a piece of equipment which allows me

to move a pointer around the screen

and select any piece of information I want to

and put it anywhere on my map.

It was also the decade that saw the final erosion of any barrier

between the forecasters and their audience.

Here they come now, wet, windy and a deep depression, north eastern.

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

By now they were public property.

So there was suddenly this flowering of people coming

out from the little niches, in their little boxes.

# I'm singing in the rain... #

You suddenly thought, "Actually they are humans.

"They've got legs, they're not just from the waist up.

The weather forecasters had become so big,

they even inspired some tribute acts.

LAUGHTER

No...

Yes. What, yeah, mm.

It's going to be very nippy!

Yes, Oh, yes.

Got to wrap up warm, mmm, yeah.

Plenty of woollies, you can't be too...

I say, you can't be too careful!

It's getting colder these days, don't you think?

Much colder, yes. Well, bye-bye!

# Here's the weather man

# John Kettley is a weather man

# A weather man

# John Kettley is a weather man

# And so is Michael Fish!

# And so is Billy Giles!

# And so is Ian McCaskill!

..and these little ripples, far to the west of us, here.

# It's windy and coldish

# I wish, I wish

# Because I like Michael Fish

# I wish, I wish, I wish, I wish! #

APPLAUSE

-How does it feel to be a hunk?

-Uh, wonderful, wonderful.

But just as weather presenters were getting more fun,

the weather itself was taking a sinister turn.

The disturbance in the equilibrium of the Antarctic's atmosphere

is almost certainly caused by human activity.

There were lots of ideas around

about ways in which man was affecting the environment,

some of that started in the '70s, but certainly in the '80s

they became very clear in the public consciousness,

with things like ozone depletion and acid rain.

The major cause of acid rain is sulphur dioxide,

it can kill trees and poison lakes.

And worse, nuclear fallout felt to many like a genuine threat.

"When the wind blows" was a phrase

that took on a whole new, dark meaning.

The idea took hold that human activity

might be destroying the planet.

Just as the weather forecasters got less serious,

the weather itself seemed to be getting darker and more threatening.

No-one knew it, but a storm was brewing.

Good afternoon to you.

Earlier on today, apparently a woman rung the BBC

and said she heard that there was a hurricane on the way.

Well, if you're watching, don't worry, there isn't.

Michael Fish's notorious "no hurricane" forecast

is still remembered 25 years on.

Not because he was factually incorrect,

he wasn't, there was no hurricane,

this was a very surprising storm that came up from the Bay of Biscay

which hadn't been forecast.

His misdemeanour was his tone of voice because it came across

as an expert talking down to the little people, the lay people.

And the fact that he was then, as it were,

proved wrong by the weather that night showed that the weather is,

as it were, not on the side of the experts,

it's on the side of the lay people. You know, we got him.

Or had we?

The forecasters closed ranks and stood firm on the fact

that the weather forecast had been technically correct.

Experts today defended the Met Office.

They said it wasn't really their fault

they didn't see what was coming.

This type of depression is notoriously difficult

to forecast accurately.

If you look at that agonising performance by poor Ian McCaskill

the following day...he was...

unable to say, "We got it completely wrong."

But under the most intense interrogation, he nearly broke.

Are you weathermen just shrugging your shoulders

-as a result of all this?

-No.

Or is there in inquest going on down there at the weather centre?

At this very minute, and it will be for the next several months,

we are getting better and better.

This one just stronger than we thought.

No kidding.

I mean, if you can't forecast the worst storms for several centuries

three hours before they happen, what are you doing?

And now the Shipping Forecast issued by the Met Office on behalf of

the Maritime and Coastguard Agency.

There are warning of gales in Fitzroy, Shannon and Rockall.

Well, even though Michael Fish did say that there was going to be strong

winds on their way, if you'd been listening to the Shipping Forecast

on that night in October 1987, you'd have had a much clearer picture.

An unambiguous gale warning, severe gale warning for southern England.

There are warnings of gales in Thames, Dover, Wight, Portland,

Plymouth, Biscay, Fitzroy,

Sole, Lundy, Fastnet, Irish Sea, Shannon...

The Shipping Forecast has remained almost exactly the same

since the Met Office prepared the first one back in 1924,

although there is one notable exception.

In 2002, the sea area Finisterre was renamed Fitzroy

in belated recognition of Robert Fitzroy's founding work at the Met Office.

Shannon west or northwest, 4 or 5,

becoming cyclonic gale 8 to storm 10 later.

The forecast, which has a word limit of 350 words

is broadcast everyday on Radio 4 long wave at 00:48, 05:20,

12:01 and 17:54.

And it has this incredible brevity, incredible concision.

Every term used, such as imminently, later, good,

have a absolutely precise definition.

And once you've learnt what those definitions are,

this is the most calibrated way of listening to the weather information.

Viking. North Utsire.

South Utsire. Forties.

Cromarty. Forth.

There's a poetry about it,

there's a real sense of history about it,

the fact that it's so unchanging

and this iron horse of the broadcasting schedule,

-it's always there.

-Tyne. Dogger.

Fisher. German Bight.

Most people who listen to the Shipping Forecast

have no need of it, but it is this kind of national lullaby,

it's a walk around the perimeter of the British Isles before bedtime.

Dover. Wight.

Portland. Plymouth.

Biscay. Trafalgar.

And so we go on that tour and it stabilises us,

but also, of course, it's a tour

of places which feel to us dark and unknown,

and so again we have that extraordinary fusion of a ritual

that keeps us calm.

It's a lullaby, but at the same time it reminds us of what is unknowable

and frightening and the dark waves which might toss up anything.

Fitzroy. Sole.

Lundy. Fastnet.

Irish Sea. Shannon.

Rockall. Malin.

The Shipping Forecast is there to save lives,

and that's why it has to be there at

the same time every day, read in the same way

and can't be shifted in the schedule,

so they've really got to be specific and get it right,

and it's got to be heard in a way that people in a wheelhouse

being washed over by massive waves can still hear it coming

through on the crackly radio.

-RADIO TRANSMISSION:

-All stations. All stations.

Occasional rain or drizzles for a time. Visibility moderate, good.

Occasionally poor for a time.

The Shipping Forecast is still vital for many fishermen

up and down the country.

Tim Courtis is a Cornish scalloper.

He needs to spend 200 days at sea every year

if he's to make ends meet.

The scalloping is very weather dependant, we need fine weather.

If there's a lot of swell, then out capture rate goes down by half.

Anything over force four, like onshore wind, then we can't go,

it's the swell in the water means the dredges are sort of jumping up

and down on the bottom and we're just wasting fuel then.

So it's uneconomic to go, so we work as hard as we can

when the weather's fine and stay in when it's poor.

For Tim, the shipping forecast is essential to his business.

It can make the difference between a day in the harbour...

..or a dawn heading out into open waters.

We check the weather every day, multiple times a day,

and we listen to the coastguard reports, we access the internet,

television on the boat.

Usually we know the day before whether we're going the next day

and then it's a final visual check in the morning before we go.

Viking. North Utsire. South Utsire.

Southeast, 4 or 5, increasing 6 or 7.

Perhaps gale 8 later then veering south-westerly 5 or 6.

Occasional rain, moderate or good. Occasionally poor.

Bad weather can do more than stop boats going out.

Storms have nearly destroyed Polperro Harbour

which Tim works out of.

Polperro is tucked away on the Cornish coast.

Its very existence is due to the weather, partially shielded from

the prevailing south westerly winds.

The community was and still is dependent on the sea.

Acting harbour master Olly Puckey

keeps a constant watch on the weather.

Everybody involved with the sea listens to the weather forecast.

It's like everything stops, "The weather's on, drop everything

"and go and listen to it."

A storm gate protects the harbour

so when the forecast predicts bad weather, the community can act.

This harbour is very exposed

and reliant on the storm gate we have here.

It's surprising how quickly the sea can build up here.

In the middle of the night if the wind does pick up,

somebody is there on hand to save the harbour.

The satellite picture sets the scene, it shows the British Isles,

in fact, it's underneath there somewhere, a lot of cloud,

and indeed a lot of rain too to the south,

another band of wet weather further north as well.

Despite a freezing start, the 1990s were a mild decade

with winters one degree warmer on average

than the winters of the 1960s.

The Met Office opened a centre for research into the earth's climate

just as questions about possible climate change were being raised.

In the coming years, sales of sun cream would go through the roof

and worries about global warming engulf previous concerns

about acid rain and the ozone layer.

It's very clear that climate is changing

and that we have a lot of confidence that a lot of that change

is to do with the release of greenhouse gasses by society.

What's difficult to know is exactly how they'll change climate

and weather on very small scales that really affect people.

Chaos theory had taught meteorologists

that the weather was never going to be 100% predictable.

Now climate change brought another idea of unpredictability -

that the weather might change in all sorts of unknowable ways.

South westerly winds.

These are already into the West Country, they'll be pushing

their way across bringing clearer weather and colder weather too.

Someone who has been keeping an eye on the volatility of weather

is wine producer Bob Lindo.

He has been growing grapes for the past 14 years

on the lush slopes of his Cornish vineyard.

Vineyards springing up is a sign of global warming in itself,

there's no doubt about it. There is no doubt about it.

I can tell you that it's a polytunnel warmer here than it was

when we started, cos when we started we had polytunnels.

I can be more than anecdotal, we've analysed the weather data

and we compiled a ten-year rolling average of temperatures

over ten years and there's a definite increase over ten years.

And it has been for 20 years.

It's not open to debate, those figures are recorded

and it's the same everywhere you look in Britain.

But it's still a challenge to grow grapes in the British climate.

I don't think I'm ever not checking them over, really.

Cos if we get a late frost in Eastertime,

that wipes a whole year out.

Only two days ago the forecast was wall-to-wall sunshine

and suddenly they started to talk about it turning colder

and then they start to talk about hints of frost

and then you see on the weather pictures

that it's starting to get light winds over the west here,

so we could get a night frost.

If you get a night frost, that's the end of the ripening.

You can still pick the grapes if you pick them all straightaway,

but you can't ripe them any more without the leaves.

The leaves are the sugar factory.

Bob has learned to encourage extra leaves to grow around the grapes

which act as a blanket and allow the fruit to ripen.

We tried all sorts of ways to conquer the weather

and in the end you tend to try and live with it,

for example, with frost, we started early on, we got up at night

and lit straw bales to try and keep the frost away.

That didn't work.

And then people will invent magic sprays and you try them

and then they don't work.

And then we actually bought a machine, it was like a flame thrower

that put round a 100 foot jet, a 100m jet of hot air, that didn't work.

None of these things really work.

It's better to try and go with the weather,

with nature if you like, than it is to try and beat it.

The weather really influences the quantity

that we're going to get really,

that's the main effect for the weather.

In terms of the flavours, really for the vines, even when it's warm,

we think it's warm, it's still very cold for the vine,

so we still always get these really light delicate English flavours

that you associate with England like strawberries,

raspberries, gooseberries, elderflowers, pears, apples,

you always get those flavours

because it's always cold for the vines.

For this morning, then,

our band of rain that we've just seen coming in to the west

will steadily start to push over towards the east.

The new millennium saw the beginning of weather that seemed

difficult to categorize.

There were floods, droughts and even a tornado.

The damage is extreme and localised, dozens of streets,

and speeds reaching 130mph. Little could withstand such power.

Erratic weather was matched by some unusual forecasts when in 2005,

Jeremy Paxman was told to read the weather at the end of Newsnight.

Here it is, shorn of the usual folksy nonsense

about clouds bubbling up and advice about wearing woolly socks.

Eastern parts will mainly avoid the rain except for those that don't.

And there will be bright or sunny intervals.

Western areas will be cloudy with rain

except in those places that don't have rain.

Temperatures will be near normal.

But the forecasts on Newsnight were soon forgotten

when the BBC proudly unveiled their new look weather map,

designed to cope with the vagaries of the ever-changing weather.

Fantastic new graphics, just a shame it's the same old weather.

The colder air coming in behind this thicker cloud

that's in the south, it's giving some light and patchy rain,

it's just nudging its way towards the southwest.

Here's the clearer skies, you can see the change in colour,

that's clearer skies, and with light winds it's going to be really cold.

As we come closer in,

this cloud in the south is giving a few spots of rain.

The new three dimensional animated map was record breaking -

it cost over £1 million to produce

and it drew 400,000 complaints as soon as it appeared.

There seems to be nowhere between Norwich and Manchester,

it's like the whole of middle England doesn't exist.

The new format looks rather like a poor video game

superimposed on a coffee-stained dishcloth.

I don't like the map very much, I think it looks like

Weetabix has been left in the milk too long.

Not everyone disliked the map,

but complaints rained down about the camera swooping across the country,

about the lack of place names,

in fact about every aspect of the new visuals.

The viewing public is very quick to complain and take notice

of any kind of change in how the weather is presented.

It's a very comforting ritual, an evening ritual,

and people are very upset when this ritual is changed.

That's it from me.

I think it's a collective ownership of the way that,

and as a result, we feel like we've got a collective ownership

of the weather forecast as well.

But the changes were not just superficial,

one of them in particular appeared to some to be politically motivated.

The map was tilted away from the viewer,

making Scotland look about ten times smaller than England and Wales,

when in fact it's half the size.

Angus Brendan MacNeil, the SNP MP for the Western Isles

raised questions in the House of Commons,

saying that this was... That if it had been tilted the other way...

then Barra would look larger than London.

A fortnight after the rebranded weather had appeared

the BBC bowed to pressure and undid some of the changes.

Most significantly, it gave Scotland its landmass back.

Fingers crossed for a few sunny spells towards the southeast.

And here then we're looking at a top temperature of 21 or 22.

But forecasting had moved on and the map had to keep up.

These days, the BBC Weather Centre meteorologists have cutting-edge

technology to help them compile forecasts for the days ahead.

It's an incredibly complex process.

You take millions of observations from around the world,

put that into a supercomputer

which has got more than a million lines of code,

doing trillions of calculations

and with all of that, you churn out the forecast

that you see on the television. Ultimately that is the end result.

Duty meteorologist Laura Gilchrist has Met Office technology

at her fingertips to help her prepare the television weather maps.

Here is my Met Office computer which I can use to view

weather observations from all around the globe.

At the moment, I'm showing a map of the UK, as you can see,

and it has overlaid the visible satellite imagery

which we can receive from space,

this is how it would look to people on the International Space Station,

so we can see a lot of cloud over here.

Over the top is radar, which is rainfall.

And basically that's showing this rain is what we had last night,

that's clearing away. There's a few showers around,

but both the radar and the satellite is showing me right now

is that there's a good deal or really nice weather

down in the southwest at the moment which is going to move

across this afternoon and give us quite a nice day.

The most recent IBM computer they had installed

can process 125 billion pieces of information per second.

That's more than there are human beings on the planet every second.

Super computers have done what humans alone could never do.

A four-day forecast today is as accurate as

a one-day forecast 30 years ago.

In pre-computer days, there was one meteorologist who,

as almost as a joke,

calculated that it would require 64,000 people working simultaneously

on the data to produce an accurate weather forecast.

Even with all this advanced technology,

the weather can still evade the forecaster.

So, remember that barbecue summer we were told to expect?

Well, guess what? It's not going to happen.

I'm fact, the Met Office says it never actually promised us one

in the first place, they just said we were odds-on for hot weather.

Welcome to the barbecue summer at Keswick in the Lake District.

It remains a very imprecise, very inexact science,

so that when surprising events happen,

as happened in 2012, when a drought that had been predicted

to last all summer was immediately

followed by the heaviest rains on record,

this is beyond the capacity of even the biggest computer.

Recently, a conference was held at the Met Office headquarters

in Exeter discuss this unusual sequence of weather events.

Looking into the future, the weather will become even more varied

and potentially even more extreme as well.

So you will have more extremes of rainfall,

already that's happening

if you look at the records, we're getting four days of extreme

rainfall in a year compared to what was three days before.

And because the weather is very varied in the UK,

perhaps we'll notice those extremes more

and they'll have more of an impact.

Everyday, over 350 weather reports are broadcast,

with the on-duty forecasters having to negotiate this uncertainty.

On top of that, they must try and deliver the science

in the clearest possible way.

Meteorologist Carol Kirkwood has been presenting the weather

at the BBC for 20 years.

It's a science,

and there's no point going on air talking about sympathetic troughs

or PVAs cos nobody would know what we were talking about.

What we have to do is translate that meteorological information

into everyday language,

and if you don't do that, in my opinion, you have failed.

There is a level of entertainment in it

because you have to keep somebody engaged and somebody watching.

If you talk in a monotone voice all the time like,

"Good morning, it's going to be wet and windy today,

"but it will be sunny across Northern Ireland,"

it's like, "What happened there?"

I get accused a lot of smiling,

but I can't help it because I love my job,

I don't deliberately set out to smile, I will at the beginning

and the end, but when I'm doing it, it's enthusiasm,

it's our subject, it's meteorology, we're fascinated by it as well.

So you try and deliver it in the best form

that is appropriate for that weather.

And you can see, temperature-wise, again,

that cool field coming across Scotland, Northern Ireland

and northern England, but still, in comparison,

relatively mild in the southeast.

Expectations are high. There is enormous pressure on the Met Office

to get the forecasts right and on the weather presenters

to communicate them clearly and concisely.

The weird thing about weather forecasting is it has

a language all of its own.

Forecasters on a daily basis use expressions that are never used

in any other walk of life.

Thunder only ever comes in odd rumbles.

And as with all things weather related,

people like complaining about it.

Sometimes I laugh with the ridiculous phrases that are used.

I could give you some examples.

Cloud bubbling up, for instance. Bits and pieces of rain.

We have a weather front sitting down.

We're going to have a sandwich of weather today.

A little ribbon of cloud flirting with the southwest.

Sharp showers. Why should showers be sharp?

Knives are sharp.

A squally band moving currently through Kent, Essex and Suffolk.

It has always been true that weather forecasters must cater

for a large and varied audience.

Pleasing all the people all of the time, is no easy matter.

So you certainly can't describe the weather as dull over

the next couple of days.

It will keep us interested even as we get wet. Thanks very much.

This ambiguity of tone between being a scientist on one hand

and being a television personality on the other,

this has been an issue over the last 60 years.

With the weather becoming more extreme,

the forecast is more important than ever,

especially in places that are vulnerable to the elements.

All the way, you'll notice the isobars,

especially further south start to slacken,

so it's not going to be as windy through the afternoon.

5 gust 7 from the west.

At the Forth Road Bridge on the east coast of Scotland,

maintenance supervisor George Hamilton

is always worrying about the conditions.

As far as my job's concerned, I live with the weather,

as soon as I get in, the first thing I do is get a weather report.

Tommy, could you give me a wind speed and direction, please.

5 gust and 7 from the west.

I've seen myself out there with the boys working

and all of a sudden you can actually see it coming from the west,

the black cloud and the wind, and you don't have much time to get off,

the wind just catches you, so you've got to be very aware if you like.

High winds affect the road traffic too.

The weather at the bridge is monitored 24 hours a day

from the control centre

and speed restrictions are put in place if winds become too strong,

but not everyone heeds those warnings.

In extreme wind conditions, if you look out there at the mid-span,

it can actually go east to west between 6m and 7m.

That's an awful lot of movement

and, things like that, the bridge would be closed and that.

Every day, George is utterly reliant on the weather forecast.

Every morning, I listen to Carol Kirkwood on BBC.

She's my queen, you know,

so I've got to listen to her before I come out in the morning.

I listen to everything she tells us because she's pretty good.

The Forth Road Bridge is very high-maintenance.

Every inch needs to be constantly checked and weather proofed.

You're always thinking about the weather,

at the moment I've got the painters, you can look at the suspender wires

that's holding the bridge up. We're painting them,

we need the weather for that and the wind, the rain's not good.

And that's ongoing, it will take us six years to finish that,

but as soon as we're finished that we're back at the first one again

because you get quite a bit of corrosion.

So, it is ongoing, it's never-ending.

I hate the weather.

Over the last 60 years,

weather forecasting has gone from this...

to this.

Perfect predictions are a dream we persist with,

-despite all the evidence that they will never be possible.

-Oh, no!

We all now can see weather forecasts information on our phones,

we all use apps and we all expect those weather apps to tell us that

whether it's going to rain for us in the exact location that we are,

whether we can really do it down to the postcode scale that people

expect I think is...probably a matter for debate

and probably we can't right now.

But I think that's probably where weather forecasting is going

to this very hyper local idea.

For all the gadgets and new technologies,

many still want some human engagement.

Watching the weather forecast is a daily ritual for millions.

There's an interesting social science research recently which showed

that huge numbers of people watch the weather forecast after the news.

But when interviewed afterwards, most of them, about 70% of them,

couldn't remember at all what was said about the weather.

They were allowing it to sort of glide over them

as a kind of national conversation about the weather.

And part of the national conversation about the weather

will always be about problems with the forecast.

I'm quite reassured in a way that the weather forecast is wrong

because it means there are still mysteries.

The meteorologists today will be the first to admit

"We can't control it. We can predict it to the best of our abilities, but the default position is,

"we don't know what it's going to do. This is the best we can do,"

and it think that's very healthy.

It's important to remember that the weather forecast is

a triumph of technology in a science still very much in its infancy.

I think our forecasting skills are going to become even better

than they currently are with the evolution of technology

and the information available to us,

the satellites that we have orbiting the earth. It can only get better,

the computers are getting faster and faster all the time,

as is the knowledge that we have of our climate.

The weather forecast has become a touchstone,

a moment of calm in our stormy, uncertain times.

I think our relationship with the weather triggers

all our fears about flux and chaos,

and because of that, triggers our deepest investment in ordering,

in ritual, in trying to tell the future.

And the weather forecast, just those few minutes after the news,

somehow manages to condense all of that into our daily lives.