In 2018 I set out to write a book about the weather. The plan was to stick true to a philosophy and approach that I think of as my ‘hub and spoke’ model. At the hub of the wheel is the core idea that nothing in nature is random, every single thing we see has a cause and once we learn to decipher that cause it turns every observation into a clue. Every few years I come at this philosophy from a different direction; considering the meaning of every puddle, ripple and glitter path over the ocean led to a book called, How to Read Water.
My simple plan was to collect every useful weather sign, clue and omen that had ever been observed by me or anyone else throughout history. There is an extraordinary colour and richness in some of the oral traditions and weather lore, but also a good dollop of bunkum. One legend holds that the weather on St Swithin’s day, 15th July, will continue in the same vein for the next forty days. Met Office data shows that there is not a single instance of this being true in all the records since 1861 – the closest was 1995 when there were only two wet days following a dry Saint’s day.
I wanted to take inspiration from tradition, but cast off the unreliable whimsy and write a book based on solid science that distilled human ability to divine the weather through our senses and not machines.
I was commissioned to write that book and was only a few months into the research when I discovered something shocking. Every single book, forecast or conversation about the weather that I came across in those early months referred to the weather a few hundred feet above our heads, not the weather that we actually experience.
Meteorology is a truly brilliant science, but it applies itself almost entirely to broad atmospheric phenomena that often range over hundreds of miles and high above us. And yet our days are shaped by the weather that happens within feet of us. We live in tiny pockets of weather called microclimates. This changed my plans for the book and The Secret World of Weather became a book about clues and signs and the weather as we experience it, not the weather the computers know.
