Storm warnings are a vital part of the work of the Met Office based in the UK, but 150 years ago the very idea of such forecasts was highly controversial.
In July 1867 William Sykes MP drew attention in the Commons to the fact that storm warnings had been suppressed, and called for them to be reinstated.
Vice-admiral Robert FitzRoy, who led the meteorological department under the Board of Trade, had launched a system of storm warnings for mariners in 1861. The notifications had saved many lives and vessels. Yet shipowners disliked them: warnings meant that sailors stayed in port, costing the owners money.
When FitzRoy died in 1865, control of his department, the Met Office, passed to the meteorological committee of the Royal Society, headed by his rival, Sir Francis Galton.
The committee declared that Fitzroy’s “so-called” storm warnings were unscientific. Galton produced a skewed statistical study “proving” the warnings were useless the service was discontinued in 1866.
There was a flurry of complaints, but the committee insisted it was not willing to “prognosticate weather, or to transmit what have been called storm warnings”.
In parliament Sykes was told that scientific authorities agreed that there were no reliable rules for predicting storms. While FitzRoy might have appeared to have made some successful predictions “it was not ascertained that he had based his prophecies upon any system which could be carried out by others”.
The committee seemed immoveable. But money can oil wheels, and, spurred by a government grant of £10,000 a year for research, the committee was persuaded to resume storm warnings in 1868.
