Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
A meteorologist at the London Weather Centre, the only female forecaster there, known for broadcasting weather reports on the BBC.
On the island
Eight records
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Love is Blue / L'Amour Est Bleu
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The Young OnesFavourite
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The keepsakes
The book
In conversation
Presenter asks
0:58So roughly the London Weather Centre gets its information from headquarters and localises it.
This is rapidly.
Presenter asks
1:07As well as giving reports on the BBC, do you also supply the weather reports one can get on the telephone?
This is right. Anybody can ring up. This is part of what we pay our taxes for. You can ring up and get your forecast if you're driving. Up to Scotland for instance.
Presenter asks
2:22How many of you are there at the center doing the broadcast?
There are about ten at the moment.
Presenter asks
2:28You're the only girl.
At the moment, yes.
J.R.R. Tolkien
Presenter asks
2:54How exact a science is weather forecasting? How often do you expect to be right?
On the average, about eighty per cent of the time we're right, and this includes forecasts of wind direction and temperatures and whether it rains or not we do. believe it or not, do checks on whether the forecasts are right and we find that this to be about the average, and that's taken from the layman's point of view. If we say it's going to rain, they check on whether it does in fact rain.
Presenter asks
3:22Is there any perceptible change in the overall trend of weather in this country? Is it getting hotter or colder?
Not so far as our records bear out. Since we've been taking them, but there again I must emphasise that they've only been going for about a hundred years for [the] history of the race of human beings on the earth is so very much longer than this. But we try and dig out what they were like before from these historical accounts, and there appears to have been some trends, but these are very, very uncertain and uh people are still working on this.
Presenter asks
3:55Has anybody done any work on the value of old wives' tales? For example, does weather change with a new moon? Will there be a severe winter if there's a big crop of berries? Do cows lie down if it's going to rain?
Well, a lot of work has been done on this score, yes. Um many of these are in fact old wives' tales and have no foundation in fact, but things like cows lying down when it's going to rain do, because in fact they seem to have some built in mechanism which tells them that the humidity is high. And this is really why they lie down, because very often high humidity just precedes oncoming rainfall. And therefore they're keeping, of course, sir, nice dry spot for themselves.
Presenter asks
4:42What about St. Swithin's Day?
Well, according to our records, it bears out almost the reverse of the legend. The legend is that if it rains on St. Swithin's Day, it's likely to rain for forty days after that. Well, if it rains on St. Swithin's Day, the records show that it's often dry more times than it's wet during that forty days following it.
“I often feel like blowing bubbles there like a fish.”
“On the average, about eighty per cent of the time we're right, and this includes forecasts of wind direction and temperatures and whether it rains or not we do. believe it or not, do checks on whether the forecasts are right and we find that this to be about the average, and that's taken from the layman's point of view.”
“Since we've been taking them, but there again I must emphasise that they've only been going for about a hundred years for [the] history of the race of human beings on the earth is so very much longer than this.”
“Well, a lot of work has been done on this score, yes. Um many of these are in fact old wives' tales and have no foundation in fact, but things like cows lying down when it's going to rain do, because in fact they seem to have some built in mechanism which tells them that the humidity is high.”