Ask anyone around the World what the British are preoccupied by and they will almost all say the same thing, the weather. Now, this seems, intuitively, to be a slightly odd situation. In the UK we only rarely experience extreme weather events. Technically we have more tornados than Kansas, but they barely register on the Fujita scale. We get storms, but we don't get any of the tropical storms that develop into hurricanes, typhoons and cyclones. Our seasons are pretty clear and don't vary much year by year. We get a bit of snhow in winter, some storms and winds in spring and autumn, and a fairly hot dry spell in Summer, so for those who experience nature at its most savage there must be a point at which they wonder what we actually find to say about the weather.
I think it probably goes back to at least the development of agriculture in the UK some 6000 years ago. If, as a society, you are reliant on agriculture for your food then a part of that is a reliance of the weather to germinate, grow and ripen the crops successfully. But this can't be the full story, because we do have relatively stable weather, which is one of the reasons that as a nation we have always been pretty good at feeding ourselves, to the extent that it was one of the key reasons for the Roman invasion, and the primary reason that the vast majority of wealth in Roman Britain was centred around the South West, particularly the Cotswolds, Gloucestershire and Hampshire. It even links to one of Britains most famous monuments, Stonehenge. There is a theory that it was built as some kind of astronomical calender, marking the solstices and thereby setting the farming year, but having worked on farms, this doesn't make a lot of sense, since the climate is just variable enough to make calender planting difficult beyond having a rough idea of where you are in the year, which farmers tend to have anyway.
What is interesting, is the way that in spite of incredible advances in technology, we still cling to folk methods of weather prediction which are largely based on observational experience. The development of modern meteorology began in 1922, and has largely progressed hand in hand with computers and computing power. The reason for this is the sheer complexity inherent in the system. 1922 saw the development of mathematical formulae for weather predictions, but the mathematics required 64 mathematicians working flat out to work through the calculations and it still took so long that by the time the calculations were complete the word forecast was no longer appropriate. As computers developed post 1945 and as the speed and capacity of computers grew exponentially it was possible to develop more and more complex equations to take into account a greater range of variables and enhance weather forecasting further.
It is funny though that the most accurate prediction for British weather, in spite of 6000 years of development and the massive amount of computing power now brought to bear is......
.......tomorrow will be pretty much like today
And yet it is the conversation we are most famous for........
I think it probably goes back to at least the development of agriculture in the UK some 6000 years ago. If, as a society, you are reliant on agriculture for your food then a part of that is a reliance of the weather to germinate, grow and ripen the crops successfully. But this can't be the full story, because we do have relatively stable weather, which is one of the reasons that as a nation we have always been pretty good at feeding ourselves, to the extent that it was one of the key reasons for the Roman invasion, and the primary reason that the vast majority of wealth in Roman Britain was centred around the South West, particularly the Cotswolds, Gloucestershire and Hampshire. It even links to one of Britains most famous monuments, Stonehenge. There is a theory that it was built as some kind of astronomical calender, marking the solstices and thereby setting the farming year, but having worked on farms, this doesn't make a lot of sense, since the climate is just variable enough to make calender planting difficult beyond having a rough idea of where you are in the year, which farmers tend to have anyway.
What is interesting, is the way that in spite of incredible advances in technology, we still cling to folk methods of weather prediction which are largely based on observational experience. The development of modern meteorology began in 1922, and has largely progressed hand in hand with computers and computing power. The reason for this is the sheer complexity inherent in the system. 1922 saw the development of mathematical formulae for weather predictions, but the mathematics required 64 mathematicians working flat out to work through the calculations and it still took so long that by the time the calculations were complete the word forecast was no longer appropriate. As computers developed post 1945 and as the speed and capacity of computers grew exponentially it was possible to develop more and more complex equations to take into account a greater range of variables and enhance weather forecasting further.
It is funny though that the most accurate prediction for British weather, in spite of 6000 years of development and the massive amount of computing power now brought to bear is......
.......tomorrow will be pretty much like today
And yet it is the conversation we are most famous for........
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