EXTREME WEATHER METEOROLOGIST TV
Rolling TV news showed the effects of heat in the corner of the HQ screen that summer. An almost-black blob spread like oil across a sweltering swathe of England, to almost as far north as Sheffield. Davies and his team watched in awe as the map on the screen turned an ever-angrier red. Seven stations hit 40C, including in London and Coningsby in Lincolnshire, where the heatwave peaked at 40.3C. Soon 46 weather stations recorded temperatures above the 2019 record. Just before midday on the 19th, the Met Office announced a provisional temperature of 39.1C in Charlwood, Surrey, breaking the previous UK record set in Cambridge in July 2019. Temperatures soared through the third weekend of July 2022, hitting 38C by Monday 18th as hot air from the south became trapped under a high-pressure ‘heat dome’. ‘It was in the models, and we forecast it, but the reality was something different,’ Davies says.
Now a historical document, it may always have the power to shock, like news footage of a calamity.
Davies asks Dan Suri, the duty chief forecaster, to throw on to the big screen a temperature map from 19 July. The picture was very different last summer. Bar some possible localised lightning later on, there isn’t much to concern the forecasters. The system he’s describing is bringing cloud and cold air from the north-west, delaying any need for spring dresses. ‘Can you see that bold area of cloud moving out to the North Sea, and this speckledness of cloud coming in behind that?’ Davies says. Supercomputers hum in climate-controlled bunkers beneath our feet. Now, on a grey day in April, he’s talking me through the images produced by multiple data streams from satellites and weather stations. The primary tools of his trade were a pencil and rubber. The professor started out as a wet-eared forecaster in Norwich in 1992. Paul Davies, chief meteorologist at the Met Office, stands in the middle of it all. In one corner of the screen, Dermot O’Leary and Alison Hammond are looking at some ‘fresh new frocks for spring’ on This Morning. Live weather maps and TV feeds are thrown on to a giant video wall. The room sits at the heart of an £80 million steel-and-glass citadel of science on the edge of Exeter in Devon. All appears calm inside the operations centre at Met Office headquarters.
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