Great Storm 1859 mapped by FitzRoy and Babbington

Description

This image shows a copy of the weather map drawn by Thomas Henry Babbington under the direction of Robert FitzRoy from the archives of Met Office at Exeter. It is now a very precious document and, after many years of being folded, too fragile to flatten out entirely. Nevertheless, we can still see the swirl of arrows indicating the differing wind directions at 9am on the second day of the storm with the various different shadings indicating rain, hail and snow at the location where the observations were being made.

If you pass your mouse over Wales you will be able to see in more detail where the reports of wind directions came from. For example, Point Lynus, Bardsey, St Ann's Head, Swansea and Tenby. What kind of monument associated with navigation do many of the locations have in common?

Vice Admiral Robert FitzRoy had been appointed to the task of developing the meteorological department of the Board of Trade in January 1854. With a small team of a two clerks, a statistician and a draughtsman, he began analysing the weather observations made by naval captains in ship's logs. He was soon convinced that bad weather never came without warning and that the signs could be interpreted from barometer, temperature and moisture readings, and the speed and direction of the wind.

Between his appointment in 1854 and end of 1859 when this map was printed, FitzRoy established a Voluntary Observation Fleet amongst naval and merchant captains. He arranged for instruments to be taken onboard many of the larger ships working out of British ports, and standardized those observations with a Log and simple instruction booklet. He had arranged for barometers near the quaysides of ports and harbours for the benefit of smaller fishing vessels so that they too might not be caught out by sudden changes in weather. He distilled all his experience of weather at sea and what he had subsequently learnt on land into a series of rules which he wrote down in a small book called Barometer and Weather Guide, published in April 1858.

He had seen his counterparts in the United States (Captain Matthew Maury) and in France (Le Verrier) begin to use the operators of the new telegraph services not only for sending storm warnings but also as meteorological observers. But he still had doubts about the practicalities of implementing a system in Britain when the most of the weather approached across the Atlantic rather than across land when telegraphic observers could pass speedily pass warnings along.

FitzRoy had an concept for weather maps that would be produced 'as if an eye in space looked down on the whole Atlantic at one time and afterwards took similar views (much more extensive than a bird's eye) at regular intervals of hours and days, so as to obtain sequences of synoptic conditions'. He used the word 'synoptic', which has become a standard name for such maps, and he might have been describing of the views produced by today's weather satellites, 100 years before the first was launched into space.

FitzRoy wanted to review and chart a year's worth of gathered data to give the department more confidence in its predictions. Specifically, in the autumn of 1859, FitzRoy tasked Thomas Babbington to draw two charts for every day, at 9pm and 3pm GMT, of weather over the Atlantic and Britain for the period October 1856 -March 1857. He wanted to prove that repeated plotting at set times would prove that the path of a great area of low pressure could successfully be tracked as it moved over the sea and land.

Two factors would soon prompt FitzRoy's hand. The British Association was about to propose the development of a Storm Warning Service to the Board of Trade - FitzRoy firmly believed that his department should fulfil that function. The other factor was the weather itself. Extremely warm weather had continued from the summer well into October 1859. But on the night of 19 October, the temperature suddenly dropped to below freezing in London but remained warm and muggy in Belfast. On the morning of 22 October 1859, the barometers within the Board of Trade's meteorological department suddenly dropped. Robert FitzRoy believed that there would be gales and even snow in the north of England. This proved to be true. On the heels of this bad weather, over the night of 25-26 October, came a storm whose winds swept around the compass and whose ferocity rose to hurricane force. The hurricane force winds continue to blow until well into the afternoon.

Action was demanded by the swell of public feeling about the loss of the ROYAL CHARTER and all the other shipping around the coast. FitzRoy requested and was sent instrument readings taken before, after, and during the storm from all over Britain. From this mass of data, Babbington prepared the above chart and in doing so proved that rapid, accurate weather charts could be made from simultaneous incoming data.

The Board of Trade subsequently gave FitzRoy the go head to begin sending storm warnings service to the appropriate parts of the coast by telegraph.
To facilitate this service, he developed a coding system for squeezing the most information into the fewest characters to be sent by telegraph. He worked with the coastguard to establish signals hoisted on land that would be large enough to be seen at sea, robust enough to withstand gales, and carry the vital information about force of the winds and direction of approach of the storm. The patterns for these signals and signal masts were sent to Portsmouth and Devonport dockyards for manufacture.

A vicious northwesterly gale on 9 February 1861 saw the first storm warning being sent by telegraph to Aberdeen, Hull, Yarmouth, Dover, Liverpool, Queenstown, Valentia, and Galway. The message sent two days earlier on the 7 February read as follows:

'Caution - gale threatening from southwest then northward. Show signal drum.'

On 1st August 1861, Fitzroy began to slip general weather forecasts into daily newspapers. The first read:

'General weather probable during the next two days. North moderate westerly wind fine. West Moderate south westerly wind; fine. South Fresh westerly; fine.'

Soon these were being published 6 days a week in 6 newspapers, plus one weekly newspaper, and at Lloyds, the Admiralty, Horseguards, and, of course, at the Board of Trade.

FitzRoy described the system for sending out these weather forecasts in his The Weather Book: A Practical Guide to Meteorology published in 1863 (pg194):

'At ten o'clock in the morning, telegrams are received in Parliament Street, where they are immediately read and reduced, or corrected for scale errors, elevation, and temperature; then written onto prepared forms, and copied several times. The first copy is passed to the Chief of the Department, or his Assistant, with all the telegrams to be studied for the day's forecast, which are carefully written on the first paper, and copied quickly for distribution. At eleven, reports are sent out the Times (for second edition), Lloyds, and the Shipping Gazette; to the Board of Trade, Admiralty, and Horse Guards, Soon afterwards similar reports are sent to other afternoon papers: and late on the day, copies, more or less modified in consequence of telegrams received in the afternoon are sent out for the next morning's early papers.'

Today, modelling these synoptic views going forward in time relies on the atmosphere being represented by thousands of equations built into numerical models. FitzRoy and Babbington would recognize the horizontal geographical base, dividing the globe into grid squares as shown on their map above. However each square is divided vertically to represent differing levels of the atmosphere. Millions of readings of temperature, baromatic pressure, rainfall and wind speed come in from weather stations, ships, aircraft, and helium balloons carried high into the sky. Despite the data crunching power of modern computers, the final interpretation still relies on the skill and expertise of the human weather forecaster.

Sources include:
Halford, Pauline, 2004, Storm Warning: The Origins of the Weather Forecast, Sutton Publishing, Stroud, Gloucester.
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Robert FitzRoy
FitzRoy, R, 1863, The Weather Book: A Manual for Practical Meteorology (available from Google books online)
The Met Office (www.metoffice.gov.uk)
Walker, J M, 2012, History of the Meteorological Office


What was special about the signals which FitzRoy designed for the storm warning service that ensured that they looked the same for each and every direction they were viewed?

The signals are shown on page 350 of his Weather Book (or pg 317 in the online .pdf version available below from Google books).
http://books.google.co.uk/books/about/The_Weather_Book.html?id=qNK7AAAAIAAJ