Join WILLIAM THOMSON on his journey each month exploring a Shipping Forecast region
In the first four articles of this series we have learnt about the origins of the iconic Shipping Forecast, starting with the wreck of the Royal Charter and Robert Fitzroy’s dedication to stop the loss of unnecessary life through early storm warnings transmitted around the British Isles via telegram, accompanied by barometers in busy ports. To follow on the story, this month we will explore how this visionary man made the information accessible to all with the first ever national forecasting system.
In 1861 Fitzroy organised with The Times newspaper to ‘furnish certain meteorological returns in the paper’, with the first one published on July 31 (appropriately enough, my birthday!). This followed an article Fitzroy had written the year before titled ‘How to forecast weather’. The interest in this piece attracted such attention that the forecast in July was welcomed by everyone - but it looked slightly different to a modern forecast with the iconic pictures of sun, clouds, rain and snow.
Instead, it had a list of just over 20 locations with eight columns, labelled B. E. M. D. F. C. I. S. At first appearance this makes little sense, but an explanation at the bottom gives clear instructions.
B stands for barometric pressure, better known as air pressure; high pressure is commonly associated with clear blue skies and low pressure indicates cloud and rain. E stands for exposed thermometer in the shade (i.e. air temperature). M is ‘moistened bulb’ measuring evaporation and dew point. I’m not sure how this would be useful for the laymen, and the fact that it was disregarded in later forecasts shows the evolution of forecasting to provide what people actually want to know - is it going to be sunny or rainy, windy or calm?
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The first forecast does help with this. D stands for direction of wind and F is the Beaufort Scale of that wind (more on that next month). The practical information then keeps coming; C represents cloud cover on a scale of 1-9 and I is the initials for the sky appearance; b is for blue sky, f is for fog, h is for hail, l is for lightning, m is for misty, s is for snow and t is for thunder. Do you think these letter initials are better or worse than our modern icons?
Finally, the last column S stands for sea disturbance on a scale of 1-9. The forecast ends with a general weather outline for the north, west and south of Britain with a simple explanation for those whose minds were boggled by the columns of coded numbers and letters.
This has Fitzroy’s precision stamped all over it - aman of astounding intellect and resourcefulness, with
