Exactly 75 years ago, for the first time in five years, the British people were treated to a weather forecast. The war in Europe had ended and weather prospects were no longer an official secret. The Met Office, an arm of the War Office, was so strategically important that at the outbreak of hostilities it was moved out of London to protect it from bombing.
In heavily camouflaged huts, forecasters set up on Dunstable Downs, Bedfordshire, and were linked to Q Central, the British war communications centre at nearby Leighton Buzzard. Throughout WWII until VE Day, via Q Central, forecasters receiving reports from many sources, including British ships crossing the Atlantic, produced updated weather forecasts as frequently as every half hour. The accuracy of these was vital to inform military operations – most famously D-Day, but more usually, for the RAF – details of cloud cover to aid the defence of Britain and later for Allied bombing raids.
So important was the weather to the war effort that all general forecasts were banned. Farmers and anyone else who needed to know what the elements might throw at them were forced to use their own observations or fall back on folklore. For these groups of people the resumption of forecasts on VE Day must have been particularly welcome.
