Features / Interviews
Blame it on the weatherman
Behind the blue front door of a Totterdown terrace, Barry Horton is checking the amount of rainfall that this corner of Bristol has had over the past 24 hours. His gauge is an old champagne bottle, and the rain sloshes around in the bottom as he carries it to the kitchen to pour it into something more precise.
“This is one of the few measurements I take manually every day,” Barry explains, gesturing to his other equipment outside in the garden. On a pole, with a solar-powered device uploading data automatically every ten minutes, are sensors measuring humidity, temperature and atmospheric pressure.
Up on the roof of the house, spinning wildly in the gusts, is an anemometer, measuring wind speed and direction. “It’s all very low maintenance, except when it goes wrong,” Barry jokes.
is needed now More than ever
“I became interested in weather as a child for two reasons,” he says as we sit down at his wooden kitchen table. “I was a schoolboy in 1963, which was an exceptionally cold winter. There was snow on the ground from December to March, and we built igloos. Around the same time, I was given the task at school of going onto the science room roof to update the weather data chart. It meant I got out of assembly, which I hated, so I started taking more of an interest in the measurements.”
Keeping a weather record became a hobby for Barry, and he kept it up as he moved across the country for work, before settling in Bristol. He moved to Totterdown in 1993, and has been faithfully updating the charts since then.
“I studied meteorology and climatology as a mature student,” he explains. “I wrote my dissertation about climatic extremes – not that we get much extreme weather in Totterdown. City weather is always warmer than the countryside because concrete takes a long time to warm up and cool down, creating a ‘heat island’ effect. It’s a gentle place to live on the whole.”
Barry is a fellow of the Royal Meteorological Society, and as such his measurements adhere to certain standards – collecting rainwater in a champagne bottle notwithstanding. His weather station can’t be an official site because of the effect of the urban environment, but Barry is meticulous.
“If the weather is bad or unusual, we get hundreds of visitors to the website. People contact me when shed roofs blow off, asking to know what the wind speed was. We’re fascinated by the weather here in the UK. Sometimes big businesses contact me too, because the data is so localised.
“Back when Cabot Circus was being developed, there were two unusually cold winters which set the schedule back. The engineers sent me a request to prove the temperature in case it went to court. There was a £500m project at stake, just over the temperature data.”
In 1995, Barry self-published a book about the weather in the West Country, finding accounts from as far back as the late-seventh century. He talks enthusiastically about the project, and flicks through the book, stopping at a page that makes him chuckle.
“This was the day frogs fell from the sky in Thornbury during the 1800s – there was a waterspout in the Severn Estuary that lifted the frogs into the clouds and dumped them down with the rain.”
The research also unearthed annual weather data from 1853, adding his own to bring it up to the present day. “There are some gaps in the data, but there are clear trends showing temperature spiking in the late 80s. Averages have gone up and stayed up. You’ve got to have your head in the sand to think that climate change isn’t happening. It doesn’t prove that it’s caused by us, but the data shows it’s happening.”
As our conversation wraps up, we watch the past ten minutes of recordings upload to the computer, automatically slotting into one of the neatly organised folders on the desktop. Rest assured: if any strange weather phenomenon occurs in the city, Barry will be the first to know, and the data will be in safe hands.
See Barry’s records, going back almost 25 years, at www.bristolweather.org