Episode 1 Storm Troupers: The Fight to Forecast the Weather

It's variable,

it's hard to predict, it has a massive impact

every hour of every day.

It is, of course, the weather.

I'm Alok Jha and I'm a science journalist.

I want to investigate how, through history,

people have tried to predict what the weather will do.

That's what this series is about.

The story of the extraordinary characters

who took on one of the hardest problems in science -

how to forecast the weather.

In this episode, we go back to the 1800s.

In an age when what the weather did was a matter of life and death,

I'll find out who sowed the seeds of modern forecasting,

like the pharmacist who first named the clouds.

I'll be experiencing Francis Beaufort's famous wind scale for myself...

and discovering the story behind Britain's first weather forecast.

I want to find out who made the science of meteorology happen

and how did they do it?

What technology did they develop down here

to understand what was going on up there?

Despite 200 years of trying to predict the weather,

it's still incredibly hard to know what it will do tomorrow.

And throughout history, people have tried to second-guess it.

Before modern technology could help, people looked to the natural world

for clues about what the weather might bring.

Some of that ancient folklore still survives today,

in traditional sayings handed down over time.

One of the most famous is, "Red sky at night, shepherd's delight.

"Red sky in the morning, shepherd's warning."

Part of it is a reliable form of weather prediction.

If we see a red sky at night,

it means that the sky is clear to the west, where the sun is setting.

As we get most of our weather from the west,

it means fair weather is on the way.

But red sky in the morning refers to weather in the east.

That's the good weather that's leaving us.

It could mean that bad weather is coming. But it may not.

So, it's a less reliable saying.

Another common belief is that you can get a sense of what

the weather may do by looking at the behaviour of animals.

We've all heard the old wives' tale, "If you see cows

"lying down in a field, it must mean that rain is on the way."

Now, there is no scientific evidence to show that that is true,

or false, for that matter.

But there are some bits of animal behaviour that might give us

an indication of what the weather might do.

CATTLE LOW

Author Tristan Gooley has written about nature's

clues concerning the weather.

If anyone knows what old wives' tales we should take notice of, it's him.

If we remember that cows are historically, in days gone by,

they were prey animals, like sheep, like deer.

Prey animals like to align themselves,

so they've got their bums, their rear, into the wind.

This allows them to look out in front of them and to the sides

and pick up the scent of any predators coming from behind.

This helps us because if we keep watching these animals

and we notice they are all facing one way

at one point in the day and a little bit later, they're facing another

way, that's a really strong sign that the wind has changed direction.

If the wind changes direction, that is

a pretty sure sign that the weather is just about change.

THUNDER ROLLS

But even as late as the 1850s, people still thought that

animals might be useful in predicting the onset of bad weather.

One man even went as far as building an instrument to exploit that fact.

He called it the tempest prognosticator.

It was a sort of barometer but instead of mercury,

it used leeches.

On the face of it,

a lot of people might say it's a nonsense thing, it's a joke.

But no, far from it.

Doctor George Merriweather, a medical doctor, Victorian,

used leeches. They were in common use.

But he had come across a poem by Erasmus Darwin and in that poem,

which lists lots of local folklore

about how the weather is going

to be bad, says the leech has risen to the summit of his prison.

So, the leech has gone up.

And that's an indication that it triggered a thought

in his mind that he might be able to build something to encapsulate

that power, that natural instinct to predict the weather.

He invented this contraption and it does work.

It has 12 glass jars around it, each with a leech in,

with a little bit of water and the leech, when it's going to be

stormy, tries to come up and get out where the air is.

And to do that, he has to try and get into that tube,

which is covered by a little piece of bone.

And by touching that, it releases a little hook there,

which releases the chain, which releases the hammer to fall against the bell...

-BELL CHIMES

-..and it goes "bing".

So, you go to bed, perhaps you've set them all

and you come down in the morning and there's 8 or 9 gone off, it is

sure certainty that there's going to be a storm.

If you come down and there's only perhaps one or two, perhaps they

were just feeling a bit bored in the night and a bit more sensitive.

That's why, probably you'd call them a jury of leeches, cos there's 12,

the more bells that had gone off, the more chance of certainty of being a storm.

BELL CHIMES Doctor Merriweather didn't manage to sell a single

one of his strange leech devices.

The tempest prognosticator was relegated to the history books

as just another Victorian curiosity.

It certainly works and there's no question of that in my mind.

Leeches are very good with their instinct.

It's not particularly easy to set up.

Each little bell going off, you have to reset it. It's very finely set.

And keeping leeches and keeping the jars clean and changing the water,

yeah, a barometer is a lot more easy thing to use.

It's certainly true that this contraption is a bit unwieldy

to take on board a ship.

And it was shipping that would eventually drive

the science of the weather forward.

Sea captains wanted a way of being able to second-guess the weather.

And one instrument did exactly that. It was the barometer.

It was invented in 1643

but not out of a desire to predict the weather.

Scientists were trying to solve a more mundane problem.

To demonstrate what it was, I need a lot of water,

a house on a hillside befitting an Italian nobleman and a chemist.

The history of the barometer really starts

with a very surprising observation.

And it starts with a problem, in a way, of an Italian nobleman,

who wanted to get water from a stream up to a garden at the top of the hill.

And he and his workmen noticed something really bizarre

and that was that they couldn't pump, by suction,

the water up above about 11 metres.

They just couldn't get it to the top of the hill.

And so, at that point, what they did was they wrote to the most

famous scientist of the day, that was Galileo,

and they said, you know, "We don't understand, can you explain?"

And Galileo had worried about this for some time

and he imagined that when you've made this column of water

and you've pumped it up, the weight of the water itself was

so much that, actually, the water would snap, a bit like a rope.

And so, at that point, a whole series of discussions ensued to try

and understand what the nature of this problem was.

Could you actually do an experiment that would prove this?

Galileo suggests that instead of using water,

you should use a denser liquid, like mercury,

which would therefore allow the whole experiment to be scaled down.

-So, you're not building an 11 metre tube of water?

-Well, that's right.

And it was one of his former students, a man called

Evangelista Torricelli, who actually did the experiment.

-And the results were really quite amazing.

-What happened?

Well, we should go and take a look.

We need to get up that hill

because we're going to recreate Torricelli's experiment of 1643.

Torricelli is the Italian physicist and mathematician credited with inventing the barometer.

Andrea has the glass tubes we need.

More importantly, our quicksilver, mercury.

So, here's the tube which we have to fill.

'The glass tube has to be completely full, with no air inside,

'for the experiment work.'

So, Torricelli completely filled a glass tube with mercury.

And then what he did was he upended it with his finger over

the end of the tube, so that the mercury would stay in place.

And then, he removed his finger

and watch what happens at the top of the tube. Watch carefully.

Suddenly, the mercury starts to drop, right?

And an empty space appears at the top of the tube.

This empty space wasn't there before. This was completely filled with mercury.

-Absolutely.

-And you put it into this reservoir and this gap's just appeared.

-This is a vacuum.

-It's a vacuum.

-There's no way air could have gone up there.

-That's right.

And back then, vacuum was actually thought to be impossible.

An idea that really went back 2,000 years to Aristotle.

And yet, here it was.

So, how is this vacuum being created then?

So, what Torricelli realised was that what

he had constructed was a way of actually weighing

the atmosphere, exactly like a set of scales.

And what he was doing was weighing the weight of the mercury

in the tube against the weight of the air pressure

pushing down on his reservoir. And the two were in perfect balance.

And this led him to write to a friend of his,

an incredible sentence.

He wrote, "Noi viviamo sommersi nel fondo d'un pelago d'aria elementare."

We live submerged at the bottom of an ocean of air.

It was an extraordinary realisation.

And I suppose at some point, the height of this thing will change,

depending on the conditions in the air.

Well, that was something that they spotted really quite quickly.

And, in fact, in Italy, they were amongst the first people,

really, to start realising that if you measure the height

carefully, you notice that when the mercury dropped, well,

that signalled that there was bad weather coming within a day or so.

And if, on the other hand, the mercury went up,

then there was good weather on the way.

And barometers became completely fascinating.

I mean, they spread like wildfire across Europe.

I mean, no respectable scientist would be seen without

a barometer in the corner.

And everyone started recording pressures obsessively.

In the early 1700s,

the barometer became the must-have gadget for the well-to-do.

And it happened just as the Age of Enlightenment began.

It was a time when scientists categorised and classified nature.

The weather was the last natural phenomenon to be classified

and that started with its most enigmatic feature, clouds.

In 1802, the pharmacist Luke Howard came up with

a modern scientific method for describing them.

His essay on the modification of clouds is now regarded as one of

the most significant contributions to 19th-century meteorology.

Author and historian Richard Hamblin has made a study of Luke Howard

and his work.

I'm meeting him on Hampstead Heath, where we

can also get a good view of the sky.

So, Richard, how did Luke Howard actually end up classifying the clouds?

Well, his great insight was that clouds come in many different shapes

but very few basic forms.

I mean, if you look at the sky now, this great grey blanket,

it looks like the sky is one giant cloud.

This is a huge nimbostratus cloud that was raining earlier on.

It's beginning to clear.

But look, you've got these little puffs here,

these little heaps, little bits of cumulus fractus,

moving across the sky, breaking up, not going to last for long.

Clouds come in almost infinite variety of shapes

but very few basic forms.

And that insight really led him to classifying them

into three major families,

to which he gave already existing Latin names.

Cumulus, which is Latin for heap or pile.

Stratus, Latin for layer or sheet.

And cirrus, which is Latin for a sort of lock of hair or tendril.

So, the clever part wasn't just the naming of parts, as it were,

you know, the heaps and the layers,

but what he came up with was a way of tracking clouds as they change.

Because clouds are always on the move, they're never at rest,

they're always rising, sinking, merging,

spreading across the sky from one minute to the next.

And one cloud will turn into another cloud.

So, for example, a high, wispy cirrus cloud that descends

and spreads into a layer is then called cirrostratus.

And by doing that moment of naming,

by saying a cirrus has spread into a cirrostratus,

you're able to track changes of the clouds, almost in real time.

Howard began with clouds in their simplest form,

cumulus, stratus and cirrus.

As clouds merge and transform, they could become

cirrostratus, cirrocumulus, and stratocumulus.

And there are other cloud types at higher altitudes.

Finally, cumulonimbus is a tall thundercloud.

It was the ninth of the 10 cloud types to be categorised,

and if you were in a good mood,

rising above the storm, you'd be on cloud nine.

The impact of Howard's cloud classifications went

far beyond the sciences.

It coincided with the Romantic movement,

a time when artists were drawing on nature for inspiration.

In the hands of one of the most celebrated Romantic

artists of the period, John Constable, the weather became art.

The Victoria and Albert Museum in London holds the largest collection

of his work, which he began exhibiting in 1803.

Constable sought to paint landscape pictures that had dramatic

weather effects.

He mentions in a letter of 1821, that

the sky is the principal organ of sentiment.

It means that the main emotional content of a landscape

comes from the sky effects.

And pictures like these drew on the oil sketches of skies

and so on, he called it "skying",

that he made near his house in Hampstead, in the early 1820s.

Here, we have 30 or 40 of Constable's famous oil sketches.

A number of the sketches have little notes scribbled on the back.

They say things like the time of day and they mention weather effects.

Some of them say, you know, "cloud coming on" and so on.

I mean, the famous remark about cirrus

because he's using this technical term,

is indicative of the fact that he knew what cirrus clouds were.

So, he's kind of augmenting his countryman's eye

with theoretical knowledge.

But looking at nature itself was absolutely central to what he did.

Constable's sky studies prove his fascination for the clouds.

But it wasn't just clouds that the Victorians wanted to classify

in scientific terms.

GREENWICH TIME SIGNAL PIPS

Now, it's time for the shipping forecast,

issued by the Met Office on behalf of the Maritime

and Coastguard Agency, at 1130 on Thursday 24th March.

The shipping forecast is one of the most familiar sounds

and one of the longest-running programmes on British radio.

There are warnings of gales in Sole, Shannon, Rockall...

It owes its origin to Sir Francis Beaufort, who in 1805,

came up with a numerical scale used to classify the force of the wind.

South Biscay, variable three or less, becoming westerly

or south-westerly, four or five, occasionally six later.

It's called the Beaufort scale,

still used in the shipping forecast today.

Well, that brings us to the end of the shipping forecast.

You can hear the next forecast at six minutes to six.

Beaufort had a reputation for meticulous record-keeping,

that would eventually earn him the title Admiral

and a position as hydrographer of the Navy.

He produced his wind scale whilst recuperating from an injury

received in a battle with the French Navy.

In creating the scale, he applied the same principles that

Luke Howard had proposed when he classified the clouds.

I've come to the Met Office in Exeter, where some of the earliest

weather records, dating back to the mid-1700s, are kept.

Katherine Ross looks after the nation's meteorological archaeology.

And she has a very important document to show me.

This is Rear Admiral Beaufort's diary, in his own handwriting.

The page we are looking at here is where he wrote down,

for the very first time, his Beaufort scale of wind.

As you can see, there are 13 forces, starting with zero for calm,

three, light breeze, six, fresh breeze.

Six different types of gale and then 13 being a storm,

his highest force at the time.

This scale is obviously a little bit subjective. How useful was it?

Yes, it was a starting point but Beaufort himself

realised that this was not the be-all and end-all.

He was quite frustrated that sailors were using lots of different terms

for the same wind speed and that there wasn't a way to universally

apply the same language to the same wind on all occasions.

And so, he devised a wind scale which would allow just that.

So, the following year, he came up with his second version.

-And you've got that in your hands.

-This is his second diary.

-Yes.

See if you can recognise any differences.

Right, well, I can see the first page, this is the scale of wind.

There is a 12-point scale, going up to hurricane.

And starting off with light air.

This is very similar to the scale we use today.

Yes, we still use the 12-point Beaufort scale.

The other interesting thing about this scale is that

Beaufort described the exact conditions in which each

type of force would be applicable, so that captains could always know

that they were applying the right force to the right wind conditions.

And therefore, it would be a universal system.

Beaufort's wind scale also describes the state of the sea.

At scale 1, the wind speed is 2 knots, almost 3mph,

with a sea described as calm, rippled.

But at scale 12, the wind speed is over 60 knots, more than 74mph,

with a sea described as phenomenal.

You can tell what the scale is

just by looking at the state of the sea.

I'm going to find out what it's like

to feel the force of the wind that the Beaufort scale measures.

So I've come to BMT Fluid Mechanics in Teddington.

They operate several wind tunnels here

to test whether ships, oil rigs and buildings

can withstand the force of the wind

before the full-scale objects are constructed.

Today, project manager David Ravenscroft

is testing my ability to stay upright

throughout the entire Beaufort scale.

As you can see, this is the wind tunnel.

How closely can you simulate the Beaufort scale in here?

We can simulate it very closely.

We can run the wind tunnel from zero up to 110mph

and every kind of increment of wind speed in between,

so yeah, very closely to the actual Beaufort scale.

The wind tunnel looks small, but it's very powerful.

It's capable of producing very high wind speeds.

So I'm being very carefully strapped in.

Our operator, Tom,

is going to slowly increase the wind speeds in here

and then step us up through the Beaufort scale.

So let's get going.

WHIRRING

OK, so we're at number 1 on the Beaufort scale.

This is just light air. Nothing uncomfortable.

Beaufort's scale measures even the lightest wind,

which he classifies as breezes.

At 2 on the scale, it's a light breeze.

Further up the scale, things get a bit rougher.

This is 8 on the Beaufort scale.

43 or so miles an hour. This is a gale.

And for the first time,

I can actually feel slightly pushed back.

I'm having to just lean forward slightly to stay upright.

And I can feel my clothes sort of being splayed out slightly.

Scale 8 is a very rough to high sea.

At scales 10 and 11, it's described as very high,

with winds approaching 60 knots, more than 70mph.

But at the top of the scale, things get much, much worse.

Thankfully, they don't subject me to force 12 for too long.

Thank goodness you're here.

Well, that was incredibly unpleasant.

As the wind started to pick up...

It started off as something quite gentle on the face.

Very soon, my hands and face, that were exposed,

got very, very cold.

And towards the sort of storm speeds,

it's incredibly difficult to stand up, obviously.

I was using every muscle in my body to sort of fight against the wind.

Thank goodness for these ropes.

Otherwise I would have definitely blown right back

into the back of this tunnel here.

Definitely don't want to be in a hurricane any time soon.

Initially, Beaufort's wind scale didn't catch on.

The Navy were more preoccupied with fighting the French

than understanding the weather.

But all that changed in 1815 with the end of the Napoleonic Wars.

The focus of training, then at the naval college in Portsmouth,

shifted from warfare to exploration and mapping.

The naval world that Francis Beaufort occupied was a tough place.

And not every young officer had what it took

to captain their own ship.

But Beaufort had been impressed by one young man

who seemed to have the same attention to detail

in record-keeping that Beaufort himself had.

His name was Robert FitzRoy.

Robert FitzRoy would almost single-handedly invent

modern meteorology,

and today has a region of the ocean named after him

for the purposes of the shipping forecast.

He joined the Royal Naval College when he was just 12 years old

and would have learnt his trade on ships much like this one -

the HMS Victory.

By 1828, aged 22, he got his first command

as captain of the HMS Beagle,

the same ship on which Charles Darwin sailed a few years later.

FitzRoy's task as captain of the Beagle

was to survey Tierra del Fuego, the southern tip of South America.

Aboard the Beagle,

FitzRoy proved himself to be a fine officer and leader,

and while he was sailing through the South Atlantic,

he noticed in a very personal way

the cost of not being able to predict the weather.

Just off the coast of Uruguay, at the Maldonado Bay,

he noticed that the air pressure as measured by his barometers

was suddenly dropping.

15 minutes later, the Beagle was hit by a pampero,

a feared south-westerly squall.

It was an experience FitzRoy would never forget.

WIND HOWLS

To get a sense of what FitzRoy faced,

I'm going out into the Solent from Portsmouth

on skipper Chris Smith's yacht, Avocette.

FitzRoy was mapping the coastline of South America,

so like him, we're staying within sight of land.

Today, I can see white horses topping the waves,

suggesting a wind speed of around 10 knots, or 12mph.

That's a moderate breeze on Beaufort's scale,

which also accurately describes the state of the sea

as slight moderate.

The conditions here today

are much calmer than those FitzRoy faced off the Maldonado Bay in 1828.

Within 15 minutes of his barometer dropping,

there was wind, hail and lightning in the sky all at once.

15 minutes later, the worst of the storm had passed,

but two men had fallen overboard and FitzRoy felt responsible.

His barometer had given him notice, but he hadn't acted in time.

FitzRoy didn't have the modern navigation tools like GPS

that today we take for granted.

But he did have the best equipment the Navy could provide -

sextants, charts, his barometer and, of course, his naval training.

FitzRoy completed his survey and his trip was judged a success.

But he was haunted by the storm

in which he'd lost two of his crewmates

and almost lost his ship.

Despite this, FitzRoy returned to Portsmouth from South America

with his reputation enhanced.

Francis Beaufort was so impressed with FitzRoy's new maps

that he renewed his captaincy of the Beagle.

In 1831, he set sail once more,

this time with Charles Darwin on board

and, importantly, armed with Beaufort's wind scale.

It was the first time this was used at sea.

But while FitzRoy and Darwin were down in the southern seas...

..at Greenwich near London,

another extraordinary character would bring weather forecasting,

till then the personal obsession of a few scientists,

to the general public.

His name was James Glaisher,

and in 1840, he was appointed Britain's first meteorologist

here at the Royal Observatory.

Glaisher never attempted to forecast the weather,

but he took us one crucial step closer to it.

He set himself the epic task

of creating Britain's first nationwide weather report.

He did it by distributing weather report forms

to a network of observers dotted around the country.

The measurements they made

would provide a record of the weather at each location.

Author Peter Moore is about to give me a lesson

in early Victorian weather reporting.

So, let's have a go at filling this in with today's weather.

-I'm going to give this to you.

-OK.

-So, first of all, we need to...

-Time of day.

-It's about midday, isn't it?

-Yeah, about midday.

-The wind, we can see from up there, is blowing from the east.

-Yeah.

-So the east.

-Yeah, exactly, so put that in.

Now we've got to go for one of these variables, so what would you say?

It's calm, pretty much...

'These cards, or skeleton forms,

'were distributed to a network of weather observers

'that Glaisher set up around the country.

'What Glaisher wanted was accurate weather measurements

'taken at the same time of day at different locations.'

And last of all, we need your signature at the bottom.

I've done a piece of science there.

-You've done a bit of 1849 citizen science.

-Very good.

It's ready to be sent back to James Glaisher...

-Here.

-..here at Greenwich, yeah.

'Although the data he required was basic,

'it was enough to provide a weather report

'suitable for publishing in the London newspapers

'the following day.'

How did he get the information back?

There's a few vital things about the 1840s you have to bear in mind,

the first being the railway,

which allowed, you know, people to travel around.

So he could travel around and visit these kind of coastal places

where he was having observations, so check their latitude was right,

show them how to use the instruments.

So he could go out and come back, and it was not a long coach journey.

And then you had the electromagnetic telegraph,

which was absolutely revolutionary in its time.

It just changed society in a flash

in the sense that what was happening in Newcastle

now could be sent along the wires and be published in London.

You've got the telegraph, you've got the trains,

you've got these systematic people all across the country.

What was Glaisher able to do with that network, then?

OK, we've got to the year 1848.

And there's a new daily newspaper in town called the Daily News,

set up by Charles Dickens, who wanted to get into journalism.

And they came up with this idea in 1848

that what they would try and do

would be to provide some weather reports

of what was going on in different parts of the country

for the London readership - this was a new idea.

So someone from the Daily News

contacted James Glaisher at Greenwich,

and at that point, Glaisher thought, oh, yeah,

this is what I'm going to do with my weather network -

I'm going to bring it all together.

And so we start getting the very first weather reports

from August 1848.

The first data was sent back using the fledgling telegraph system,

what would eventually become the telephone network.

But that soon proved unaffordable.

Glaisher needed an alternative, and he settled on the railway.

With 5,000 miles of track,

the network was big enough and fast enough

to get the data back in time

to appear in Charles Dickens' new newspaper the following day.

This was around 170 years ago,

and although they were popular, these were just weather reports

about things that had happened in the country already.

It was a far cry from an actual weather prediction.

That remained tantalisingly out of reach.

The weather reports weren't forecasts.

But they did enable a crucial new development.

People could now plan how to respond to the weather.

In 1853, a US naval officer named Matthew Maury

sifted through a hundred years of ships' logs

and spotted patterns in the weather's behaviour.

At the Met Office archive

is a set of charts Maury produced from the logs.

They're not forecasts,

but they did enable seafarers to find safer and quicker routes.

-So this is an incredibly heavy set of charts.

-Yes, it is.

It's all of Maury's charts that he put together

from literally thousands of ships' meteorological logs

which he had access to whilst he was working for the US Navy.

And Maury thought if he put all of that together

then he could give people all this information in one place,

he could literally unlock all this information about the oceans.

Each line on these wind and current charts

represents a single ship's journey.

Maury then divided the ocean into ten-degree squares

which allowed seamen to find and follow the prevailing winds.

It wasn't a forecast, but it was a big step forward.

So if I'm a sailor, I can tell from this diagram

where the winds are blowing, or have been blowing,

and I can try and predict

or understand what the weather's like in that area.

Yes, you should be able to look at this and decide,

I want to get from here to here

but, actually, my quickest route is that way,

not straight through there.

Britain was at the centre of world trade

and relied entirely on ships at sea to deliver goods safely.

The Board of Trade in London

wanted charts that would cut journey times and improve safety,

just like Matthew Maury's.

They appointed Robert FitzRoy,

the former captain of HMS Beagle, to do just that.

In 1854,

he became the meteorological statist to the Board of Trade

here at No 2 Parliament Street, right in the heart of London.

FitzRoy was certain he could get the data

and create the new charts.

He very quickly presented his solution to his new bosses.

So, these are Admiral FitzRoy's wind stars,

which were essentially a reworking of Maury's charts.

And what am I looking at? I can see what look like triangular shapes.

It's essentially the same information as Maury had plotted,

but in a much more user-friendly way.

It's essentially an at-a-glance system.

So you have the same ten-degrees squares

of, in this case, the North Atlantic,

and then you have triangles coming out in rays from the centre.

And the larger the triangle,

the more observations of that wind direction.

So it's therefore showing you the prevailing wind.

And then when it was available,

he also used dots to show you the average wind.

So, again, you would just be able to know very quickly

how often you'd find a wind in that direction

and its average speed.

He also used current information

and he even provided information on the number of calms

that were reported in any given square.

The size of the circle in the middle of the square

shows you how often it was calm in that location.

And so a sailor could look at this

and work out the best route between different places,

the safest route between different places?

Yes, FitzRoy's purpose when he came to work for the Board of Trade

was to improve the safety of life and property at sea,

and these charts had a lot to do with that.

They could enable you to make a journey faster,

and therefore safer.

-So sailors really were thankful for these things?

-Absolutely.

Yes, they were good for commerce, but they saved life.

But it would be the weather around Britain's coastline

that would become FitzRoy's real obsession.

In the 1850s, hundreds of ships were lost every year.

FitzRoy made it his personal mission

to prevent at least some of this loss of life

by providing coastal towns and villages with barometers.

The result was the positioning of barometers

at prominent places at the ports, paid for by FitzRoy's department.

Historian Sarah Dry has made a study of FitzRoy

and his relationship with the fishermen

who bore the brunt of losses at sea.

Once he's in this position in this central government office,

FitzRoy can't resist doing what he really cares about,

which is trying to help fishermen and sailors be safer at sea.

And the way he does this is by lending them

very expensive scientific instruments,

made in the city by elite craftsman,

and sending them to local coastal communities,

often very poor, often with illiterate fishermen,

to be used to aid the sailors

in making decisions about when it would be safe to go to sea.

These FitzRoy barometers, as they became known,

provided pressure and temperature measurements.

FitzRoy's accompanying instructions

explained how the fishermen should interpret the readings.

What's interesting about the barometers

is that he expressly does not want them

to be used to record observations.

He's insistent that he needs these observations,

they need to be recorded in a disciplined manner,

they're brought to a central office, they're collated, they're reduced,

they're turned into the foundations for the science.

When he sends the barometers to fishermen, he says,

no, we can't trust the fishermen to take the readings.

These barometers are to be used by the fishermen themselves

to support their own independent judgments.

By distributing the barometers,

FitzRoy was improving life for the fishing communities

around the coast of Britain.

He was so enthusiastic about it,

he even funded the construction of some of them himself.

But his goal of weather prediction was still out of reach.

Then fate intervened in the most dramatic way.

This is the village of Moelfre

on the east coast of Anglesey island.

On the night of October 25th 1859,

the ship the Royal Charter was wrecked nearby.

This photograph shows the aftermath of the wreck

with its tragic remains being salvaged.

The Royal Charter was a steam clipper ship

nearing the end of a two-month journey from Australia to Liverpool.

Many of the passengers were gold miners,

returning home as rich men with their pockets full of treasure.

But by the following morning,

most of the passengers and crew had lost their lives.

As the Royal Charter rounded the north-east tip of the island,

the storm forced the ship towards rocks

about a mile to the north of Moelfre.

Local Peter Day has been studying the tragedy of the Royal Charter

for over 40 years.

So this is the area here, this is where the Royal Charter ended up?

-Absolutely.

-So describe the scene for me that night.

How did the ship end up being pushed against the rocks so much?

Because having come past that headland over there,

the wind was so strong, it had blown the sails out of the rigging.

They dropped the anchors to try and stay the movement of the ship.

And then the wind turned to blow directly in towards the shore

and was so powerful, it snapped both of the anchor chains

and was simply blown in

until the stern of the ship hit the rocks down here.

And then the ship was pressed round broadside on,

and gradually then, the wrecking process began.

Was there any way they could have avoided being smashed against the rocks?

-None at all.

-And describe for me, who saw it first?

The first people to see it

were two men working on the roof of that large white house

across the bay there.

It was a thatched roof, and the wind was lifting it,

so they were climbing up, throwing ropes over,

and as daybreak began, they then saw the wreck here on the rocks.

-And what did they do?

-Well, one ran down here.

The other ran round the village summoning help.

And eventually, a team of men known as "the famous 28"

formed a human chain, and they were getting people out of the water.

Now, what's remarkable about this

is that the shoreline's not very far away.

It seems as though you could just go down here and help.

Why was it such a tragedy?

Because most of the people on the ship ended up not surviving.

If you can imagine that today is quite a nice day

and still you've got waves blowing in.

Take that up to a hurricane wind, 100mph,

the waves would be enormous.

We would be getting drenched where we're standing now.

And so anybody going into the water

would just be smashed against the rocks and lost.

ANGUISHED CRIES

The wrecking of the Royal Charter

was traumatic for the victims, survivors and rescuers.

A Maltese sailor named Joseph Rogers was hailed the hero of the night.

He managed to get a line from the ship to the shore,

saving 21 people.

But 450 people died in the wreck.

And some of them are buried here in the local churchyard.

The Royal Charter was a new, modern, iron-hulled ship.

On board were ordinary people, not seasoned sailors.

With so many dead, it was not surprising

that there was enormous public interest in the tragedy.

The wrecking also captured the imagination

of author and journalist Charles Dickens.

Two months after the disaster, he visited the wreck site.

The salvage work was still ongoing

and he gave an account of what he saw.

"Cast up among the stones and boulders of the beach

"were great spars of the lost vessel,

"and masses of iron twisted by the fury of the sea

"into the strangest forms.

"The timber was already bleached and iron rusted,

"and even these objects did no violence

"to the prevailing air the whole scene wore,

"of having been exactly the same for years and years."

The Royal Charter wasn't the only victim of the storm.

Further south, in Pembrokeshire, St Brynach's Church

was almost completely destroyed by the force of the wind.

Just one wall still stands.

Elsewhere, according to Board of Trade records,

a total of 133 ships were lost,

with a further 90 severely damaged.

During the storm, 800 people lost their lives.

There's a permanent memorial

to the victims of the wrecking of the Royal Charter

on the hillside overlooking the wreck site.

It's a constant reminder of the loss of life.

But perhaps the best memorial to that terrible event

is what happened next.

The wrecking of the Royal Charter shocked FitzRoy.

He became convinced that it should have been possible

to predict the storm and to prevent the tragedy.

So he began working flat-out

on a system of early warnings of storms for shipping.

Within just a few weeks,

as Charles Dickens was clambering over these rocks at the wreck site,

FitzRoy presented his early findings to the Royal Society.

Back at the Met Office,

Catherine has one of the original charts of the storm

that FitzRoy produced for his report.

It shows a clear path of destruction.

-..our chart from the Royal Charter storm.

-Oh, wow.

So this is a synoptic chart, another term coined by FitzRoy,

and it's showing us the conditions actually on 26th October.

It's showing us various different observations

all over the country at that time.

And what do these lines

and these different boxes and diagrams mean?

The length of the line in this case shows the strength of the wind.

We can see rain and cloud, different weather conditions,

temperature, pressure.

We can see from the chart

that it was extremely windy in the Irish Sea.

And here off the coast of Anglesey, which was where she sank,

you can see a particularly long line,

which indicates a very strong gust speed.

FitzRoy's charts show that the storm moved northwards

from southern Ireland, across to North Wales and beyond.

The data FitzRoy collected from his network of observers

is still in use today.

Climate scientists at the Met Office have used it

in a global project to create, using supercomputers,

an accurate reconstruction of the last 200 years of world weather.

It's hoped that by examining patterns in the weather,

better models for more accurate forecasts can be created.

But this also means Met Office mathematician Philip Brohan

can show us the progress of the storm

that wrecked the Royal Charter.

This is a reconstruction

for the few days surrounding the storm of 1859.

What I'm showing here are the surface pressure fields.

Those are shown by the black contour lines on this particular map.

The wind, those are shown by the little moving arrows.

And the temperature.

And we can run this forward through the period of the storm.

And what you will actually see

is this particular low-pressure system...

intensifies and deepens and moves northwards.

That's actually the Royal Charter storm,

and you can see the winds blowing in from the west

that cause such trouble for the ship itself over Anglesey.

It's hard to look back with modern eyes at FitzRoy

and not see it as visionary,

because it is essentially what we do in the present day.

He was obviously limited by the technology he had,

by the number of observations that he had available.

But the principle is sound, OK?

And it's one of the things that makes it quite interesting

to take modern technology, with his observing network,

and actually go back and say, OK, you know,

how do these new detailed reconstructions compare

with what he thought was going on?

If satellites had been invented in 1859,

they'd have captured an image similar to this.

It's very close to what we see in the new weather map of the storm.

FitzRoy's investigations of the Royal Charter storm

convinced him he had the final piece of the puzzle.

He made a monumental decision and announced to his bosses

that he could do more than just report and plan for bad weather.

He could predict its arrival.

In doing so, FitzRoy would provide the first forecast

in the form of a storm warning.

Six months after the storm,

FitzRoy was given permission to build an early warning system.

He decided to use the telegraph to collect weather data

from 13 sites around the coasts of Britain and Ireland.

At each site, he installed meteorological equipment

and sent detailed instructions

on what information they had to collect and report back.

TELEPHONE RINGS

-WOMAN:

-American service.

Overseas...

At the BT archive in central London,

some of FitzRoy's earliest surviving records

of the setting up of his telegraph network have been rediscovered.

Sarah Dry is one of the first historians to see them.

Well, this is great - this is a map of the telegraph system in 1860,

right about the time that FitzRoy

is establishing his storm warning network.

And we can see this wonderful network of the telegraph system.

And we can look up and see Aberdeen,

which was one of the original stations.

Berwick. Coming down... Great Yarmouth is on here.

All the way down to Penzance.

This is a wonderful image

of the technology that's knitting the country together.

The telegraph network was well established

by the time FitzRoy decided to use it for his storm warnings.

And he was very specific about how he intended the system to work.

Very soon after the wreck of the Royal Charter,

it's August of the following year,

and he's already got a plan and he's implementing it.

"The plan now proposed is simple, and the machinery is ready.

"Once a day, at about 9am, barometer and thermometer heights,

"state of the weather, and direction of wind,

"will be telegraphed to London

"from the most distant ends of our longest wires."

That's great.

This is quite interesting,

because here we have a letter in FitzRoy's own hand,

and he refers to this scrap of paper, and on the scrap -

and you can see it's actually torn, it literally is a scrap -

there's a note made probably by...

Well, there's several notes. One of them says,

"All of the magnetic telegrams were late again this morning

"and not received till 10.27am."

And then we have a note in FitzRoy's hand saying, "How today?"

He's following up the next day.

It shows you just how time sensitive this information was.

I think he expected them at 10am.

10.27 was not OK.

Throughout his career, FitzRoy was used to being in charge.

He wasn't answerable to anyone.

When he began putting his storm warning network together,

he took the same approach

and supervised every aspect of the process.

So, every morning, FitzRoy arrives at the office

ready to receive observations from these coastal stations.

He then spent about half an hour digesting that material,

and he did that more or less inside of his head.

The metaphor that was used later

was almost like a chess player considering his moves.

FitzRoy sometimes described it as a physician diagnosing the weather.

Both of those things give you a sense of the element

of personal judgment that came into it

and the lack of formal equations.

Then very quickly, as a result,

FitzRoy's able to send out, when necessary,

storm warnings to coastal stations that may be in danger.

FitzRoy's first storm warning was sent in February 1861.

His data allowed him to predict what weather was coming,

how quickly it was approaching, and from which direction.

Once the information was telegraphed back to the locations in danger,

a system of drums and cone shapes made from canvas

would be erected in the ports.

An upward-pointing cone would indicate a gale from the north.

Different combinations of these cones, with drums,

would indicate which direction the winds were expected from first.

The storm warnings were a success and lives were saved.

But FitzRoy had further ambition -

to predict the weather for the public.

He persuaded the editor of the Times

that it should publish what he termed a forecast,

a word he had invented.

FitzRoy's first public weather forecast

was actually published in the Times on 1st August 1861.

And we have that newspaper here.

It's actually hidden right here on the second to last page

in the midst of a whole load of adverts.

Actually, his forecast is just these three lines down here.

So you've got all this data about the weather conditions

at different parts of the country,

and then the forecast part is just here,

-just those little bits there at the end.

-Yes.

FitzRoy didn't have permission to do this by the Government.

He just decided that people were interested

and he felt he could do it.

So this is really the first public weather forecast

produced by the Met Office.

And, as you can see, it says,

"North - moderate westerly wind: fine.

"West - moderate south-westerly wind: fine.

"South - fresh westerly: fine."

He didn't actually include the east on the first day.

-But it was going to be nice weather the next day.

-Yes.

And, actually, he wasn't far off.

The forecasts were popular and captured the public's imagination.

But with them came something that's lasted to this day -

public complaints about the accuracy of weather forecasts.

This cartoon in the magazine Punch

lampooned FitzRoy's storm warning signals,

but commonly, the criticism was much more direct,

such as this letter of December 1863.

"When Admiral FitzRoy closely follows

"the forecasts of the barometer he is often right,

"but more commonly wrong

"when he attempts to anticipate its warnings by guesses,

"for they are nothing more..."

The forecasts are failing as a bit of meteorological science

because they're not reliable.

As a bit of practical weather wisdom,

they could be seen as quite helpful,

and certainly harmless enough if they're wrong.

Practical weather wisdom

was the last thing the Royal Society's men of science

wanted printed in the newspapers.

FitzRoy was being ridiculed in the press

and they didn't want the Met Office to take responsibility

for the impact of the weather.

They began to question the science behind the forecasts.

But then something happened which no-one could have predicted.

He's coming under increasing scrutiny.

Eyewitness reports, friends at the time,

report that he's looking increasingly aged, tired,

his hearing is going.

And then in 1865, somewhat inexplicably,

FitzRoy commits suicide by slitting his throat one morning at his home.

And this throws not only his family's life into disarray,

but the existence of the forecasting network.

Robert FitzRoy died on 30th April 1865.

He was just 59 years old.

No-one knows why Robert FitzRoy killed himself,

though there are some theories.

He was a very religious man

and he couldn't quite reconcile his beliefs

with the ideas around revolution

that his friend Charles Darwin was developing at the time.

He'd also spent a lot of money on projects

such as distributing barometers, money that he never got back.

By the time FitzRoy died, he was a penniless man.

In Anglesey, the memorial to the wrecking of the Royal Charter

doesn't just mark the tragedy that cost so many lives that night.

It also marks the worldwide drive for forecasting the weather.

That owes much to Robert FitzRoy,

but he wouldn't have been able to make it happen

without the work of people like James Glaisher and Francis Beaufort.

They showed that weather wasn't supernatural,

it could be studied scientifically,

just like any other aspect of the natural world.

And if it could be studied,

if its guiding principles could be uncovered,

its behaviour could be predicted.

Though reliable weather forecasting was still many years away,

the idea it could be done was born.

Meteorology had turned from superstition into science,

and the weather forecast became an inescapable part of all our lives.

Next week...

How forecasters went to war to crack the secrets of the skies.

And how the success of D-Day

hinged on the single most important weather prediction in history.