home

weather-uk press pack

Ready-prepared articles on weather in history

• 980314 The Titanic disaster A large high pressure system lay over the Atlantic to the south of Newfoundland and the east of Nova Scotia. This ‘high’ had originated over the
• 001021 The American hostages in Iran When I first worked in the Middle East, writing weather forecasts for the offshore oil-industry, I accidentally slipped the words "Persian
• 029912 Frost Fairs and Famine Scotland’s climate reached a low point during the last two decades of the seventeenth century, the harvest failed in most years, the fisheries died
• 029901 The American War of Independence The weather forsook the British cause and fought on the side of the Americans at several crucial points during the War of Independence
• 020727 Weather in World War II A soft, silent, summer night, a desultory breeze stirring the leaves, the bright full moon hanging low in the sky … the stuff of second-rate romantic
• 029920 Fixing the Weather We have all had moments when we would have liked to switch on the sunshine or switch off the rain, to slake a drought or to adjust the outdoor thermostat
• 029921 Weather Wars Altering the weather to wage war is a chilling idea, but we know how important the wether has been in past conflicts, so it should not surprise us that military
• 029922 Attempts to prevent hail falling The earliest human communities tried shooting arrows into clouds to scare the spirits which lived there and which were responsible for
• 029923 Making it rain In areas of unreliable rainfall the research emphasis has been on artificially creating rain, rather than disrupting major storms. The first cloud-seeding
• 029924 Making smokescreens Winston Churchill became Prime Minister in May 11, 1940, and within a few weeks of taking office he was dabbling in rudimentary weather control.
• 029925 FIDO – the wartime fog clearance programme The formation of fog at RAF airfields was an incessant problem during the early years of the war, so in 1942 a programme
• 029926 Reversing the Russian rivers An extraordinary scheme to alter the drainage patterns of a large swath of Central Asia covering over 10 million square kilometres was
• 029927 Did the Flanders gunfire change the weather One of the wettest summers of the twentieth century happened in 1917, and the heaviest rain of all fell in Southeast England.
• 029928 Could radio waves change the weather? The desire to seek out culprits whenever our weather misbehaves is a comparatively recent one; 100 years ago there was
• 029929 Could nuclear testing change the weather? Right in the middle of the cold war, with the USA, the USSR, the UK and France all testing nuclear weapons, western Europe
• 029930 Hailstorms almost wreck the Queen’s Jubilee The diamond jubilee of Queen Victoria fell in 1897, and celebrations were planned for the fourth week of June across the