Weather matters more than you think.
In this episode of InsideAIR, we catch up with the RAF’s Mobile Meteorological Unit, who deliver vital weather intelligence to support military operations around the world.
Ahead of the release of Pressure, a film exploring the forecast that helped launch the D-Day landings, we explore the origins of military weather forecasting and the crucial role it continues to play today.
Listen on your favourite podcast app or on our dedicated podcast page.
InsideAir Podcast Episode 146 Transcript
Please note that this transcript is automatically generated, and may have some errors. The original audio is the authoritative wording.
Narrator: Standby for broadcast, standby for broadcast. You're listening to Inside Air, a 'behind-the-wire' view of the Royal Air Force; its people, technology, and operations.
Flight Lieutenant Chris Sully: Hi, I'm Flight Lieutenant Chris Sully, and welcome to the latest RAF Inside Air Podcast. In this episode, we'll catch up with the meteorologists from the Mobile Met Unit to find out about their work and ahead of the release of a new film about arguably the most important weather forecast in history. We'll hear how military met forecasting came into being in the first place.
Catherine: I would suggest, certainly for the Met Office point of view, it's the most important forecast we've ever made because it changed the outcome or potentially change the outcome of the war. Certainly not going on the fifth because had they done so, they would, well, majority of troops may never have reached the beaches.
That would certainly have change the outcome of the war. So, yeah, I think it's, it's safe to say it's, it's from the Met Office point of view, the most important forecast we've ever made.
'Pressure' Character Bernard Montgomery: Captain Stagg, do you want to be personally responsible? For losing this war.
Flight Sergeant Peter Crooks: We're there to help and know with you, thinking you're a commander, you're going anywhere and you are thinking we can help your decisions.
There's so much different ways we can give help to different products. We don't have to be there. Put a request in, come and talk to us to see how we can help your every day
Flight Lieutenant Chris Sully: As usual, we'll also reheat a few stories which could have slipped under your radar and we'll be finding out who's under the hat this week with AS1 Ben Russell.
Air Specialist (Class 1) Ben Russell: Hardest part of your job
Flying Officer Andrew: Being in the know before everybody else and not being able to say anything
Flight Lieutenant Chris Sully: Inside Air. We're looking at the Mobile Met Unit and we're looking at the work of the meteorological office as it ties into operations and exercises within the military and the RAF in particular.
There's a new film coming out as well called Pressure, which we'll find out more about. But first, let's chat with Catherine, who is the Met Office Library and Archive manager. Welcome to Inside Air Catherine. Tell me first of all about your job and the archive itself.
Catherine: Oh, hello there. Thanks for, thanks for having me.
So my job is to, to, to manage the library and archive. Um, I am an archivist by trade, if you like, by profession. So I know my way around the archive reasonably well. And we hold, uh, what we call the national memory of the weather. So we have all of the weather observations that have been collected by the Met Office since it was founded in 1854 by Robert Fitzroy.
And then various things like private weather diaries, which help us to understand the weather before that time. And then we have quite a lot of the, so the digital content that's now created because things aren't just paper anymore. So we look after, not additional observations, but things like national severe weather warnings and shipping forecasts and sorts of things that might be quite familiar to a lot of listeners.
And then our library provides a lot of the background information to enable people to study, learn about the weather, and then understand our archive.
Flight Lieutenant Chris Sully: You already mentioned Catherine Admiral Robert Fitzroy. How does he fit into the development of British weather forecasting?
Catherine: Fitzroy is absolutely crucial to the development of, of British weather forecasting 'cause he kind of invented it.
So, uh, in 1854 he established the Met Office. He was a Royal naval captain commander by trade. So, um, he had spent many years at sea looking at the weather, taking observations for use onboard ship, and understanding that you, when the pressure dropped and the wind rose, that meant X, y, or Z, looking at the clouds and understanding what those meant.
So he had a very sort of strong understanding of the weather. And then in 1854, when the government put out a requirement for, you know, for the UK to found a meteorological office, the Royal Society recommended him for the post. And so he was able to start collecting those observations and doing something operational with them, if you like.
Um, so initially that was about understanding what we call climatology. It was about understanding what's normally the weather, particularly in the oceans, uh, helping our ships to move around faster. And then after a particularly nasty storm in 1859, there was a call for, well, why couldn't we have prevented the loss of life that happened in that storm?
It was called the Royal Charter Storm. Um, and he said, well, we could absolutely do that. We already collect observations and know what they mean. We just have to do it faster. And so he then established a forecasting service based on that.
Flight Lieutenant Chris Sully: Was there any resistance in the early days to the idea that weather could be forecast with enough confidence, I guess, to, to make those major decisions?
Catherine: There was a lot of resistance. So, uh, particularly members of the Royal Society, the scientific profession didn't feel that you could possibly look at the sky and look at a wind direction and know what was going to happen. The weather was considered to be an act of God, and so predicting it was, you know, simply not something that could be done.
And it was early days of the science. We didn't have a lot of the knowledge that we do now. So mistakes were made and all of those were used as kind of reasons to say, ah, well you can't do it, can you? So yeah, it's an, it was always an evolving science and there was, yeah, a lot of pushback in the early days.
Flight Lieutenant Chris Sully: And when did the British Armed forces begin treating meteorology, whether forecasting as a, a formal operational capability rather than just sort of a nice to have bit of background information.
Catherine: So that came along during World War I. So in 1914, uh, when, when we went to war, the Met Office offered its services and the possibly apocryphal, but possibly true response was the Army doesn't go to war with umbrellas, so it's good, isn't it?
Flight Lieutenant Chris Sully: I love that,
Catherine: rather. Yeah, it's great. Uh, rather rapidly, the armed forces learned that we were now in mechanised warfare and that things were a little different. So, in particular, um, some of the earliest requirements came from the Royal Flying Corps, who discovered that things like cloud cover and icing and thunderstorms all mattered when you are flying a plane.
And so they started to request operational meteorologists to be embedded with them, to, to help them know when they could and couldn't send their, uh, their, their planes up. And then quite rapidly, that also, uh, started moving across to helping out the, the Royal engineers. Um. So the Met Office was actually part of the Royal engineers from, from a military point of view, at that point, they were formed as meteor, which was part of the Royal engineers.
And, uh, in particular, they were going, they were helping with a high angle, uh, shelling. So they would go up in the part, in the observation balloons and take observations of pressure and temperature and due points and things at height. And then that helped, um, much more, um, much more accurate, high angle fire.
They were also assisting with, um, forecasting for the potential for using gas on the front lines as well. So there were, um, meteorologists on the front lines, taking observations there. And then with time, sort of 19, 16 ish as the, uh, army came literally entrenched in warfare, we had meteorologists who were advising on sort of know military campaigning weather, if you like, you know, when, when would it be possible for operations and when would it be less so?
Flight Lieutenant Chris Sully: Is there a specific thing that was expected of military forecasters beyond, uh, sort of the basics of, of weather and in scientific knowledge, what were the military looking for in particular?
Catherine: So it, yeah, it was, it was really, it was quite detailed information that they were looking for, particularly for, you know, for, so for the gas forecasting, they needed weather observation.
Well wind essentially almost at, at ground level, very low ground level. So, um, you know, they were looking for, for observations that weren't necessarily useful to the general public. And obviously, you know, um, observations for the Royal Flying Core, that was a, a very new aspect of, of weather forecasting.
Thinking about, you know, what was needed for, you know, for people who were, who were taking part in aviation. So, yes, looking for, you know, looking for icing, looking for wind shear, looking for risks of thunderstorms. That was all, uh, thinking about it in a different way, if you like to just, oh, there's going to be a thunderstorm.
It's, oh, well that will have this impact. So thinking about the impacts in a different way,
Flight Lieutenant Chris Sully: let's take the story forward a little bit. Who was James Stagg and why was he selected to advise Eisenhower in the lead up toward D-Day?
Catherine: Uh, so James Stagg was a Met Office forecaster, Met Office meteorologist.
He had, you know, he, he, he'd made his name actually in a lot of Antarctic kind of research or, um, so he wasn't, it wasn't particularly known for military work at all, but what he, what he was, was a very good organiser.
So what Eisenhower needed and what the British Armed Forces needed to find in order to, to suggest Stagg was a trained meteorologist with a very good understanding of the weather, who could organise teams who may not all agree with each other, and sort of distil, analyse that information down into, into one thing with which he could deal with the pressure to take forwards to Eisenhower.
So, yes, he was essentially a, a well-trained meteorologist, a very knowledgeable meteorologist who also had the skill to work with a lot of different people.
Flight Lieutenant Chris Sully: We're gonna come back to him. There is a new film coming out called Pressure, and I'm just gonna read a little bit from the, the blurb that comes with the film, and we've got some clips to play as well.
But, uh, in the tense, 72 hours before D-Day General Dwight D. Eisenhower and Captain James Stagg face an Impossible Choice, launch the most dangerous seaborne invasion in history or risk losing the war altogether. How significant was the weather as a factor in that decision making process and therefore, Stagg's work.
Catherine: The weather was actually absolutely critical. It was the linchpin to the success of D-Day. Everything else could be planned, organised, prepared for, and you, if, if you wanted to go on the 5th of June, which was the original D-Day date, everything else could be ready and controlled. What you couldn't do was control the weather. And so having an accurate weather forecast was the difference between successfully reaching the beaches and losing the army in the English Channel along the way.
So Stagg's work was really, really critical to that decision, and it's a, it's an element of the war that's not always, perhaps as well as well recognised as we might the uh, might hope.
'Pressure' Character Dr. James Stagg: Dr. James Stagg reporting for duty.
'Pressure' Character Kay Summersby: General Eisenhower now will see you now.
'Pressure' Character General Eisenhower: D-Day will be the largest seaborn invasion in history. Churchill tells me you're the best meteorologist in the country. I need a forecast.
'Pressure' Character Bernard Montgomery: Our troops require perfect conditions, many waves over six feet, impossible.
'Pressure' Character Dr. James Stagg: So long term weather forecasting has really only ever educated guesswork.
'Pressure' Character General Eisenhower: We invade France Monday, June 5th. You've got 61 hours. The fate of the war, thousands of lives hinge on this.
Flight Lieutenant Chris Sully: Uh, we'll come back to him again. There were different forecasting teams working on it. There was some initial disagreement I understand about what the likely conditions were going to be.
Catherine: Absolutely, yes. So they were forecasting teams from the UK Met Office itself, which was based at that point in Dunstable, having been evacuated from London like many other organisations. From the RAF Well, they were more listening in so that they could ensure that their briefings were the same as everybody else from the Royal Navy, who was certainly putting in information and from the US Air Force.
Um, and their chief, their, their lead forecaster, not chief forecaster, I don't want to be misleading. Their lead forecaster, um, was Irving P. Krick. And he used a very different form of forecasting technique to the, the British approach. So to try and make that make some degree of sense, the British approach was what we call synoptic forecasting.
So you take a synopsis of weather observations at a given time. In other words, we know what the weather observations are at nine o'clock. And then you plot out your map and you plot your isobar and you plot your fronts so you know where the weather is. And then in three hours time you do it again, and then you do it again, and then you do it again.
And you look at how the weather has moved and then you use your knowledge of the British Isles and how our climate, our maritime climate works in order to produce a forecast because we have very, very changeable weather. For Krick, it was a very different approach. He used what we call the analogue technique.
So he would look at what normally happens or what has normally happened on this day or these few days in the past. So he would produce kind of a probabilistic forecast on, well usually it's sunny on the 5th of June or usually it's not very windy on the 5th of June. So he used that approach and that had worked for him very, very nicely in climates where it's not as changeable as the UK so particularly kind of continental type climates.
Um, so, but it worked very nicely in North Africa. It had worked for him working with Eisenhower and North Africa. It had worked for him when he was forecasting for the film Gone With the Wind, which is where he made his name, where you could kind of always predict that it was gonna rain at 12 o'clock in Florida because that's what the climate's like, but it doesn't work that well in the UK..
So his feeling was it'll be absolutely fine 'cause that's what it often is. And the UK of feeling was you can't base it on that. You have to base it on what's going now and now tells us it's not gonna be all right.
'Pressure' Character Dr. James Stagg: Get me the data from every Met Station within 2000 miles of Normandy. If we've measured it, then I want it.
'Pressure' Character General Eisenhower: Captain, Stagg, this is General Montgomery.
'Pressure' Character Bernard Montgomery: The enemy has doubled its defences in as many weeks. If we delay, we will lose this war.
'Pressure' Character : We're looking good, sir. The weather is a go.
'Pressure' Character Dr. James Stagg: I couldn't disagree with that more..
'Pressure' Character Kay Summersby: They won't like this.
'Pressure' Character Dr. James Stagg: There are two major storms advancing towards the Normandy coast, even as we speak.
'Pressure' Character General Eisenhower: Are you absolutely certain?
'Pressure' Character Dr. James Stagg: I'm confident that the storms will come.
'Pressure' Character Bernard Montgomery: Not good enough.
'Pressure' Character Kay Summersby: How are you so certain that they're coming
'Pressure' Character Irving P. Krick: D-Day will be calm and sunny. Are you blind?
'Pressure' Character Dr. James Stagg: If you invade tomorrow, they're going to be washed away.
'Pressure' Character Bernard Montgomery: My men are ready for the big match. Get them onto the beaches somehow. Anyhow, leave the rest to me.
Flight Lieutenant Chris Sully: Catherine, anybody listening who's been to a bird table meeting, a military brief, uh, knows that clarity and certainty are expected, and obviously you can, you can say with some degree of certainty how many landing craft might be available, those kind of things. How did Stagg communicate uncertainty in the weather that without appearing indecisive?
Catherine: Yeah, a tricky one, really. Um, so we, and we can tell from his diary that he's, he's very stressed and he's, he's aware that the, um, the importance of the decision and the, the difficulty in the fact that he cannot give a black and white answer, and he's being requested for exactly that. Um, and he's kind of saying, you, um, you know, generals were kind of requesting what will happen three days after now.
Well, we simply can't tell you. So I think essentially he was just having to be very honest in what we, what couldn't be provided. One of the things that I think helped with that is that you can't see it so much in the film, but actually Stagg and the rest of the forecasters has been working with the generals for months before D-Day.
So he had been providing, his team had been providing forecast to Eisenhower for months and months. So they built up a trust relationship whereby, uh, Eisenhower kind of knew that, you know, if they said it's marginal, they meant, they said that for a reason, and he'd sort of learn to understand the uncertainties that come with weather forecasting and the fact that he, that they wouldn't be necessarily black and white opinions.
Flight Lieutenant Chris Sully: So an incredible sort of degree of confidence, but showing that humility as well to sort of accept that you, you can't be entirely guaranteed with these things. At some point, there is a crucial briefing at which the planned D-Day invasion for the 5th of June is postponed. What do we know about Stagg's involvement with that and, and how it came about?
Catherine: Yes. So, um, the, the decision to go had to be made at three o'clock on the morning of the day before you, you are invading. So, uh, to, in order to move all of the troops across the channel through what they call Piccadilly Circus and get 'em to the right beaches. So had they been invading on the fifth as they had intended to do, they would've made that decision at 3:00 AM on the fourth.
So at 3:00 AM and the fourth, they'd have made the decision to postpone the invasion. And then the same thing happened at 3:00 AM m the morning of the fifth when they made the decision that, you know, final and irrevocable decision. that Stagg's diary says to go ahead for the sixth and started the troops moving.
So Stagg's involvement was, he had to take everybody's opinion, he has to take the various forecasts from, from the Navy, from Sable, from the Met Office that is, um, from the, uh, from the US Air Force. Decide what his forecast was going to be, bearing in mind that there wasn't agreement at that point. And then he took that forward to the joint chiefs and briefed them on what he believed the weather would be.
It wasn't his decision to say go or no go, but it was his decision to say the weather is not good enough or the weather is, should be good enough. So yeah, a huge amount of pressure and stress on his shoulders.
Flight Lieutenant Chris Sully: We keep using that word pressure. It is the name of the new film as well, but it's, it is really apt.
Do we know Catherine from, from their records, if they exist, did the German forecasters identify the same improvements in conditions? In other words, did they, their expectations at the invasion coming, did that change? Do we know?
Catherine: So the German forecast, we do a little, we know a little bit about what was going on with the German forecasters.
I don't have any diaries unfortunately. But what we do know is that they had, they didn't have access to the same level of observations. So for the UK we had access to observations from across the Atlantic, which for this was the critical piece of information because that's where the weather was coming from.
But the UK or the Allies had also broken the enigma code up at Bletchley Park. Um, and actually the weather was part of that. The repeated nature of kind of weather observations helped to break the enigma code along with a lot of other things and some very clever people. So that enabled them to access all of the German weather observations as well, because that was all just coming through in the radio traffic that was coming to Bletchley.
So the, the, what we sort of tend to say is the British meteorologist had sort of 360 degrees of knowledge of, of weather observations. So they could plot reasonably accurate charts. But if you look at a German chart for the same period, and we do have access to those from colleagues at Deutscher Wetterdienst who very kindly shared them.
We can see that it was, that was not the same picture for the Germans. So they've got their observations for Europe, which is not where the weather's coming from on the fifth and sixth uh, fourth and 6th of June. But they've not cracked the allied code. So they have no observations from across the UK and across the Atlantic.
And by this point in the war, they've also lost the majority of their air power, the majority of their submarines and shipping. So they simply didn't have the observations. And that meant that in this very unsettled period of weather, where you couldn't just see a nice high pressure sitting there and say, great, it's all gonna be wonderful for the next five days.
Bit like we're talking now in this very unsettled period, they couldn't see the tiny weather window approaching that the ally forecasters could see 'cause they didn't have the observations to allow them to plot that on their charts.
Flight Lieutenant Chris Sully: Does Stagg or do any of his team talk in the, the records at that we know about, about the, the personal pressure that the forecaster would experience knowing that at the end of the day, if they made a wrong call, thousands of tens of thousands of lives depended on them getting it right, basically.
Catherine: We can see that in Stagg's own diary. Yes. So, um, at one point, um, on the fourth, so this is when they've made the decision to postpone, and now they can see indications that the weather is improving, but they also know it's going to be a very, very, very marginal, very close call. At one point he actually writes, I'm now getting rather stunned. It's all a nightmare. So yes, you really can see, you know, the, the, there's a, there's a personal level of, you know, of, uh, mental stress that is really going on. And then on the 5th of June in his diary after, after the decision has been made, and he notes that, you know, I think it was Air Chief Marshall Tedder or said to him, you know, congrat, he should be proud of his forecast, you know, and somebody else says, you've handled it in the most mastery way.
And his note after that is they, I wonder they should wait and see how things go. So he really, really was even at that point, he knows the uncertainty of what he's just advised. So, and he essentially had to wait from three o'clock on the morning of the 5th of June until at some point on the 6th of June to find out if he'd made the best call or the worst call in history.
Flight Lieutenant Chris Sully: That's a heck of, uh, uh, personal pressure. Try and sleep through that.
Catherine: Yeah.
'Pressure' Character Kay Summersby: Stagg, he's gonna crack
'Pressure' Character General Eisenhower: go or don't go. That's it.
'Pressure' Character Dr. James Stagg: The wrath of nature is real
'Pressure' Character : and we must face the fact, however, frightening they may be.
'Pressure' Character Bernard Montgomery: Captain Stagg, do you want to be personally responsible for losing this war?
Flight Lieutenant Chris Sully: A final clip from the film pressure starring Andrew Scott as Captain James Stagg and Brendan Fraser as General Dwight D. Eisenhower, and which is released in cinemas on September the ninth. Catherine, when we describe D-Day as the most important weather forecast in history, is that justified?
Catherine: I think we, we at the Met Office would say yes.
I think a lot of people would also agree. Um, it's certainly the most, uh, the most important whether forecast the Met Office has ever made, because, you know, because yes, it was a team of people, but it was a Met Office forecaster who was the Chief Meteorological Officer, and it was Met Office advice that was saying, we don't think it's good enough, and then we do think it's good enough.
Others were, had similar opinions, but a lot of this was based on Met Office advice. Um, so yeah, it, I would suggest, certainly for the Metaverse point of view, it's the most important forecast we've ever made because it changed the outcome or potentially changed the outcome of the war. Certainly not going on the fifth because had they done so, they would, well, the majority of troops may never have reached the beaches.
That would certainly have changed the outcome of the war. So, yeah, I think it's, it's safe to say it's, it's from the metaphor's point of view, the most important forecast we've ever made from the history of Europe point of view, probably the most important weather forecast in history.
Flight Lieutenant Chris Sully: Catherine, really nicely put, we're gonna be chatting in a moment with Peter Crooks, one of the current team from the Mobile Met unit.
But certainly as we think about the film, which is sort of putting focus on this and everything else, and we look at the world that we're gonna be moving into, the, the relationship between the weather, the Met Office and the, the, the British Military and Defence of British interest is, he's just getting stronger, isn't it?
Catherine: Absolutely. Yes. You know, um, I mean there, there were others that can speak to it better than me today, but yes, you know, the Met Office has, well, since World War I has, has been bound, uh, very closely to, you know, to the military and to yes, the, the, the significance of British, British interests. And it's certainly not gonna slow down.
Flight Lieutenant Chris Sully: Catherine, the manager of the, uh, library and archive for the Met Office. Thank you very much for talking to us today.
Catherine: Oh, you're welcome. Thank you.
Flight Lieutenant Chris Sully: On this episode of Inside Air, we're finding out a bit about the work of the Mobile meteorological unit of the, uh, mobile Met Unit. Uh, we'll find out a bit about what they do, the teams that make them up, and also just how important a role meteorological weather information plays when planning exercises and particularly operations.
Joining me on the line now is Flight Sergeant Peter Crooks. Peter, welcome to Inside Air. And before we go any further, just tell me a bit about yourself. 'cause you are a former full-timer, aren't you? You're a former Royal Navy?
Flight Sergeant Peter Crooks: Yeah, I've, uh, I've been around for quite a while. So I joined the Navy in 1990 for the, their Met Branch, basically.
So I was on Met doing all the observations, which kind of leads to what Stagg for D-Day and so on. Then I left them in 98 and joined the Met Office, and then somehow they convinced me to go back into uniform for their specialised reserve unit that's part of the Met Office. And then I've been doing it for over 20 odd years from there.
So it's, it's pretty continuous on basis on 1990 till now.
Flight Lieutenant Chris Sully: So you're still looking to find that full-time career at some point.
Flight Sergeant Peter Crooks: I'm still hoping to get my forecast right. I, it's, there's a, it's a difficult thing to do.
Flight Lieutenant Chris Sully: I can imagine. Peter, tell us about the role that you fill within the Mobile Met unit.
What exactly is the RAF mobile Met unit?
Flight Sergeant Peter Crooks: So we kind of, we combine one with the Navy really. So the Navy obviously control all the sea assets. So everything that goes to sea everything that goes out, they've got their band for that. But basically since Fitzroy set up the Met Office, which was, I think it was about 1854, you know, we've basically, we've controlled, we've evolved and we've now took on all the armies and all the RAFs.
So usually if it's one of those two that's going away, it'll be the mobile Met unit that deploy with them. So you've gotta be in the Met Office, you've gotta be a fully trained meteorologist for the Met Office, and then you go away, a senior meteorologist to do all this kind of environmental advice and making sure that they've got the intelligence they need to do to make good decisions.
So we've kind of evolved from just being weather to being proper intelligence for commanders,
Flight Lieutenant Chris Sully: and we'll come back to that. When people listening hear meteorologist, they often think of maybe tv, weather presenters. How different is that to the job that you actually do?
Flight Sergeant Peter Crooks: Oh huge in a way. Um, I mean they've both got their difficulties.
I mean most of our briefs will have a little bit of the way they'll do it on the tv 'cause you can imagine if you brief into a whole command or something, their level of meteorology will vary. So the way we talk to them, we will normally start with quite a non-technical brief. So we'll talk about what's gonna be the big impacts for the day, the next couple of days, the next five days.
And then what we'll normally do then is we'll zoom into the technical aspects. So we'll very much look at what assets they can use on certain days, what will be difficult on other days. So it's kind of tying in all the units and making it so people can make the most of the environment.
Flight Lieutenant Chris Sully: What was it that first attracted you to uh, your former Royal Navy self and everything else with uh, military meteorology?
Flight Sergeant Peter Crooks: Oh, that's a terrible question. 'cause I joined for a bet and basically my brother was gonna join the RAF. He didn't, and you bet me five pounds, I wouldn't join the armed forces. So I basically went to the careers office at 15 years old. I'd already passed my maths a year early, so I knew I was in and they gave me some tests and said, do you wanna be a meteorologist or an artificer, I was just about intelligent enough to know what a meteorologist was, but I didn't know what an artificer was.
So hence I went metrology. But I've loved it since.
Flight Lieutenant Chris Sully: Excellent stuff.
Flight Sergeant Peter Crooks: It's one of them, the luckiest things you can ever do because I just fell into a career that's just wonderful.
Flight Lieutenant Chris Sully: Five pounds well spent. Let's look at the operational importance. Why is accurate weather information so critical for military aviation in particular?
Flight Sergeant Peter Crooks: I mean, if you're looking at aviation, you're looking at everything from, let's say, you could take an example if they're taken off from somewhere like Kabul, how much weight an aircraft can carry is straight off meteorology. So how many passengers can they put in, what can they lift? What can they get out? If you're looking at, you know, recovering people from medivacs or anything, is it safe for the aircraft to get there and back? Then you're looking at, you know, can they do a tactical advantage? We'll do everything from light levels. What can they see? What kind of imagery will they have? How far away can they see something? But we'll constantly keep on talking through all the kind of, it's not just the weather for 'em anymore, it's how they can take advantage of the whole environment.
Like, where's the moon in the sky? You know, what's the wind speeds gonna do to 'em? What's the temperature gonna do to affect the aircraft or any kind of weapon systems they've got on it? So we'll constantly work through and define it. So we evolve with them as they get more information and know more limits, we evolve our forecast to what they need.
Flight Lieutenant Chris Sully: So that's the evolving picture, but taking it right back, how early in the planning process of, uh, an operation or an exercise does, uh, Met and the way they become part of that.
Flight Sergeant Peter Crooks: To be honest with you, we've right at the beginning, so normally, I mean, I'm specialised in the army recently, but it's the same for all of 'em.
So normally you'll get the commander start with whatever they want to do. If you doing an operation or an exercise, they will start with their information and then it's usually our intelligence on Met that goes next because we've learned over the time, it's no good planning all your things to say, we're gonna do this in two days time, and then you, put Met at the end.
And we go, uh, no, you're not. Because you're not gonna be able to do parachuting or you're not gonna be able to use UAVs or you ISTAR that you want isn't gonna be able to see the ground. So we actually go right at the beginning and they usually adapt the plans around the weather whenever they can.
That's what I mean about giving the commander that intelligence to decide what they want to do.
Flight Lieutenant Chris Sully: So it's more than just the, the, the conditions you're likely to expect as you described. What were the conditions concern, the different operators? You've got fast jet crews, you've got transport, you've got uh, rotary helicopter, uh, and that kind of thing.
Do they, are they looking for different things from you?
Flight Sergeant Peter Crooks: Yeah, certainly. I mean if you take it from the ground side upwards, I mean usually for refuelling something like thunderstorms would be incredibly important. How quickly can they refuel it? Can they refuel it? We can get things such as Wattisham Airfield, even like the hanger doors.
Can they open the hanger doors in strong winds to get them out? So we can start with the, like the bigger easy details with that one. And then you will go specific for aircraft. So some aircraft don't like temperatures below certain degrees. So if you're in a helicopter and you've got that fine blade going round, you need to know what the outside air temperature is so it doesn't gain ice.
It's the same if we go into aircraft in the sky. Is it below zero degrees C? Is it in just ice or is it in ice and rain? Which is terrible for them. 'cause you can imagine you're just building ice over an aircraft. So we'll do all sorts of that one. So they'll be interesting. Those then you've got, can they see the ground?
I mean if you go in to do imagery, it's no good doing imagery, but you can't actually see anything 'cause there's too much cloud around. But we'll also look how much moisture is in the air. 'cause that degrades imagery again, we've got winds, we've got the actual physical weather that most people think. And then you've just got all things like how much light reflected.
So if you're using infrared imagery, we'll look at can they actually still see it? 'cause the night will go so dark that infrared doesn't work as well. So we kind of go really into the, the nuance depending on what they want.
Flight Lieutenant Chris Sully: Peter, the clue is in the name mobile Met unit. What makes the unit mobile as such?
Flight Sergeant Peter Crooks: To be honest with you, we go wherever they go now. So we're quite a small and agile unit. Um, for, for example, myself, just for the mobile Met unit, I've done 49 detachments now. So I varied from doing Iraq when I first joined, which was several Iraqs, then Afghanistan. Then we've done everyone from Iceland to Kenya, Falklands to uh, Malaysia.
So we are lucky to get a lot of opportunities to travel around. But as it increases, you know, we are getting far better as the armed forces at making the most of everything and knowing that marginal gains are everything counts. So we get more and more requests coming in, which gives us a lot of opportunities to go in away and seeing and helping, basically
Flight Lieutenant Chris Sully: Anybody that's got, uh, even a passing interest might be aware of things like the little white slatted, uh, slotted box, the Stevenson screen that you take.
But I'm guessing
Flight Sergeant Peter Crooks: the beehive,
Flight Lieutenant Chris Sully: the beehive is, is good. I'm guessing the equipment you take has moved on a lot. What sort of stuff do you take out when you, when you deploy out into the field?
Flight Sergeant Peter Crooks: So it, it would depend sometimes how long we are going to be somewhere for. So ideally in a perfect world we would set up all those kind of screens again.
But we've got a brilliant set of engineers that normally would come up and initially set it up for us. So we're going anywhere, we're going be for a while, they will set up weather systems for us. They'll have an thermometers, they'll have temperatures, they'll have lightning readings. They'll even make sure that all our computers are set up, all IT set up.
So they'll come out if we know we're gonna be in one place. So we're not going to move. Normally if it's an RAF form, you don't move that much. They will then recover. There's the army. They may stay with us and we might bounce two or three positions in tents and everything. So we will take all those old fashioned kind of things you see in a screen, but just more on an electronic version and we'll adapt that into our forecast.
'cause you can't forecast without knowing what the weather is actually doing now.
Flight Lieutenant Chris Sully: Absolutely. And we're gonna come back to that in a moment. You are based at Wattisham. You get to know the microclimate that can exist in a certain area, wherever you happen to be working. Uh, whether that's, uh, Lossiemouth, whatever it might be.
What challenges come when you are forecasting in somewhere that's unfamiliar to you? So you suddenly, in the past you mentioned Iraq and Afghanistan, wherever it might be, the Falkland islands, you arrive somewhere new. Does that make the job a bit more difficult?
Flight Sergeant Peter Crooks: It makes it a lot more difficult. I mean, because we work for the Met Office.
And the Met Office luckily is one of the leading people for global weather. We, we can lean back a little bit into their expertise. So we will go away and the expert weather hub will send us more information. They will help us and back us up. We've got Joel Mock, which is down in Northwood. They have a lot of information away.
But what you tend to have is, 'cause we do a lot with obviously data and computer systems, you don't know how confident you are in it when you first go anywhere. So when you first go somewhere, you'll find out that it, it doesn't forecast fog very well or it over forecasts cloud. So with time of being there, you evolved that knowledge to add to what the systems are.
So you become much more intelligent of knowing what to say or when to ignore something.
Flight Lieutenant Chris Sully: We've mentioned the tri service, particularly the Navy, uh, and the Air Force here, but also the Army feeding into it. How do you support multinational exercises looking at NATO and partner nations?
Flight Sergeant Peter Crooks: Yeah, well, I mean quite often we've worked quite closely with them.
I mean, Afghanistan would be a clear example. We worked in Kabul with everyone from the Romanians, the Canadians. We would worked in Kandahar with them. We do a lot of the ARC kind of exercises now where we'll try to be a lot more involved. So basically for being called out, we can actually be called out by anyone in Natto for the Mobile Met unit.
So they can but request in and we can go with almost anyone. It is more the UK forces that we adapt to, but we've worked with everyone to be honest with you, and it's more them finding who's got the expertise where, where you are lean on each other's strengths and learning how we can help each other
Flight Lieutenant Chris Sully: so that support that, uh, connectivity sort of works through that as well.
Peter, how much of the work you do is done by sophisticated computer models and how much of it still relies on, uh, good old sort of human expertise and interpretation skills?
Flight Sergeant Peter Crooks: I, I think an awful lot is still done on the, the Meteor meteorologist expertise. If you go back to, if we're in the UK when we've got the all singing all dancing model, sometimes, you know, you can lean on it a little bit more.
But even that, you know, the meteorologists working outside the Met Office on a base such as Wattisham and when they do it with a city Met Office, they're still leaning very much on their local knowledge. How the experience working through the seasons handovers for others and the training we get, which is fantastic when you go away with the mobile Met unit, like you said earlier, because you've got so little kind of local area knowledge at first you're reading up before you go, you're learning when you're getting there.
You're trying to get local flights or local drives around to see the environment that you're working in close up. So you constantly trying to gain it. You'll go probably a little bit more at the model at first maybe because you're getting used to the environment and then you'll soon start adding the advantages in and go in, yeah, this isn't working so well.
That is, so it's always a blend. Some places the model does brilliant for two or three days and then it's bad for a day, two days. So you're always trying to adapt, look at it, see if it matches what's outside your window, see if it's matching what people tell us when we get back from being further away from the base.
So you're just adding value to the model all the time. It's a good foundation, but you should always be adding what's outside your window, what's actually happening to it.
Flight Lieutenant Chris Sully: Your role, uh, is known as forecasting. Do you, so you've kind of touched on it there a bit, but do you look back and do you do sort of an after cast as it were and see how accurate things were to help feed into that model?
Flight Sergeant Peter Crooks: Yeah, I mean, it's one of the best ways of learning is both to see how well it's done over the past, which is good when you're there. Constantly assess it as you're going through the wrong, and one knows that the meteorology, it's almost like intelligence where you're having all the information and trying to predict the future.
Now, there's always gonna be times when you're going to get that wrong, especially if you're talking in really fine detail. Usually we're extremely good at the big picture, but if the cloud base is gonna be 700 foot or 1100 foot that you, you know, you're always going to get wrong at times. So you're always reviewing what we've done.
The best days to learn are normally the ones that it hasn't gone perfectly, because you can gain more from that than you coming, oh, it went okay yesterday. So you just carry on. So you've constant looking back in time. You're constantly looking what was right, what was wrong, and trying to leave your ego at home.
You just. Doing the best job you can do every single time and just making sure you keep your effort up.
Flight Lieutenant Chris Sully: So that open and critical self-reflection and with the team is obviously seamless. For anybody that's involved with military aviation is part of your, your schedule as well?
Flight Sergeant Peter Crooks: Yeah. Yeah. And to be honest with you, the military are extremely good at pointing out when we've got it wrong.
I mean, they're very, very helpful. We're saying, you got that forecast wrong yesterday and then going through minute detail with us, so you can't run away from it anyway. They will remind you that the shower was 20 minutes late,
Flight Lieutenant Chris Sully: which is, which is good feedback. You mentioned a few moments ago the, the word training.
If somebody listening to this is thinking, actually, uh, this sounds like something I might be interested in. Two questions. What's the, what are the good qualities someone needs for this job and what's the training like to become an RAF meteorologist?
Flight Sergeant Peter Crooks: Uh, so we're changing now, so we've, a lot of the time we've took the graduate.
So what they're doing at the moment, for the very first time this year actually we're going through Plymouth University, so we'll do a lot of training with them. Previously we had our own college, but we've decided, like they do for else to evolve, bring the experts outside in to help us train. So we'll still do a lot of the teaching of the meteorology, but how the courses are run is gonna be done much more as a blended way.
So they would join the Met Office. If you're joining the mobile Met unit, we actually fast track. If you don't, you have to do a year's training, then you do the meteorological course and then you become a forecaster. If you're gonna be a mobile met unit, well you can actually skip the first year and you go straight to the course because as everything else in the military, we're looking at retention and how we can get people to deploy as quickly as possible, especially when that demand goes up.
So you just apply for the Met Office. And then my other part of my job at the moment is actually a people leader. So I'll probably be the person who would recruit you and talk through and then train you.
Flight Lieutenant Chris Sully: And what makes somebody good as a meteorologist, what are, what are the core skills?
Flight Sergeant Peter Crooks: Being inquisitive, uh, puzzle solving.
If you love puzzle solving and you like that enjoyment of a challenge of what is happening, then you absolutely love the job. 'cause every day can be different. You know, you have this idea that if you go through the same routines, know you can go through the same routine and the Met and then the wind's five degrees different from yesterday and actually the whole weather forecast changes or the temperature's two degrees different.
So you're constantly puzzle solving. You get all these pieces and then you're trying to make the best solution you possibly can. So having that kind of, loving that challenge of, you know, how do I beat this supercomputer? Or how do I get this commander the best information possible with what I've got?
What is the best answer? If you're that kind of person, then you'll love it.
Flight Lieutenant Chris Sully: And for somebody who maybe has sparked an interest in that, what's the easiest way for them to find some information out to start with?
Flight Sergeant Peter Crooks: I would go through the Met Office website. I mean, we co, we constantly recruit every year. Um, there's other various ways of coming into the Met Office, but as a meteorologist, if you look into everything from LinkedIn and the Met Office website, then you can see where we are recruiting that way.
Um, we, I said we tend to take about 20 to 25 in every year just for pure meteorologists.
Flight Lieutenant Chris Sully: I've gotta ask you a straightforward question. What's the best thing about the job with the mobile Met unit for you personally?
Flight Sergeant Peter Crooks: I, I'm one of them people. I love helping them being away with the armed forces. So we get the opportunities to be so involved that, like I said, you're in the command briefs, you are then briefing all the command commanders that you could be briefing someone who wants to set up where the portaloo is and what wind direction it is.
You're constantly kind of be talking to people, you're helping people and you're just thinking you are making someone else's day easier or to make the right decision. Um, it's just a great kind of people job for that. You know, everyone kind of knows that, you know, Met is usually a quirky, happy branch that you can talk to that has a lot of information.
So it's having that interoperability and that connection to the armed forces. I just love,
Flight Lieutenant Chris Sully: I've always found the, uh, the team to be really helpful and really supportive. In Iraq, back in the mid noughties, uh, one of your, uh, contemporaries, Simon King took me out and we went and launched a, a mobile Met balloon.
But I understand you don't, you don't have those anymore. You don't use them anymore. They've radio so things
Flight Sergeant Peter Crooks: Yeah, we, we still do now and again, but I said we used to do you go for that one. Even when we left Afghanistan, we used to do competitions off Bastion base for the balloons. How high would people launch them and how far they would go.
It was a very interesting moment when we did it with the Padres and they were very competitive because you've got courses to their boss. But yeah, we, we don't tend to do it as often. But yeah, we certainly still use, I mean, how the atmosphere is acting. We just tend to do it from tephigram’s, but we still do launch balloons, just not as many as we used to.
Flight Lieutenant Chris Sully: AI is becoming a big thing whenever we talk on inside air about anything. We seem to be touching on ai, artificial intelligence more and more. How much of a role is that going to have in the future for you?
Flight Sergeant Peter Crooks: Well, I would hope that it's gonna have a big future because, yeah, again, it's a way of looking through data.
We shouldn't be scared of evolving. We should be looking, you know, our concentration was about giving the best advice possible. So if you look at how we started, like I said, Fitzroy started by doing normal observations that went into them. We started building satellite imagery radars. AI is just the next step.
It's not like it's gonna change everything. It will be built on what we're already doing and how we can improve. If we can look at more data readily, or we can have some of the boring stuff that we do, like number crunching for upper winds. If we can get AI to do that, you can get a meteorologist who can really concentrate on the important stuff.
'cause they've got more time. We can interact with, you know, the forces more. We can spend time talking through what we can do. So the AI will blend into that. So they'll, you know, they'll help us give more accurate answers. It'll help us evolve what we do and help us to spend more time with the people that need us.
Instead of going, I've gotta go back to my desk and just calculate this for the next hour. You know, you can get those answers and add to it quite readily. I think it'll still struggle with the big cause. 'cause I think it, it sticks to the middle and not the extremes.
Flight Lieutenant Chris Sully: Which kind of picks up to my, uh, penultimate question, which is basically, despite the technology, I'm guessing there will always be the need for experienced meteorologists.
Why do you believe that to be the case? If you agree,
Flight Sergeant Peter Crooks: because I think if you to get for AI to work properly, they would need every piece of information. So, you know, it's amazing how the human being takes in information when it's walking around and it's looking at the sky. When it's looking, everything the AI will extrapolate out and every answer will look as believable to a certain degree.
So if you are looking at a commander trying to use it and ai, you can get what's called, uh, positive reinforcement and think's where they get that used to it being right. Four times that they does assume it's always right. That's not always going to be the case. Like the model you are looking at, a one degree difference in temperature can mean the difference between fog or no fog.
Same again with thunderstorms. It's such a small difference that the way the wind comes down a mountain different on a different night can give you a different weather system the way that, you know, the nearest buildings I could funnel and give you a higher gust that it can't see all that all the time.
But what it will do is it'll be enabling us to give a better range of answers or narrow it down to the few options there is and then we can keep on adding that value. And I don't think it will ever get all the information because you just, the environment's too big. The subject is too large. There's too many things to tie together, which is why we'll need humans.
Flight Lieutenant Chris Sully: And of course for somebody watching the weather forecast on TV or on the radio, whatever it might be, the worst arms, you get a bit wet when you weren't expecting to, for, for military operations it's a little bit more serious.
Flight Sergeant Peter Crooks: Uh, well it isn't, isn't, I mean we hate it when that one happens. If you haven't put a shower in and then you get three spots of rain in the air, someone will tell you you've got it right and you're going, well, it wasn't significant because we concentrate on a lot of the impacts.
So we are looking at, okay, not just that it will rain, but what is the impact of the rain on you? You know, how high is the river beds? How high, you know, how much moisture is down on the ground? How soggy is this going to be? So sometimes if it's such a minute thing, someone might be annoyed that their washing's got slightly wet, but we're going to, there's only like five drops of rain.
It's, it's kind of okay. So it's getting that nuance of how important it is to the person that we're forecasting and then we might not say something 'cause we just don't see as a significant, which they'll still puzzle upon the fact,
Flight Lieutenant Chris Sully: which is back to that human element. Just one last question for you Peter.
And that's, uh, if people are left with just one thing after listening to this episode of Inside Air about the RAF Mobile Met unit, what would you like that to be?
Flight Sergeant Peter Crooks: That we are there to help. You know, if you, thinking you're a commander, you're going anywhere and you are thinking we can help your decisions.
There's so much different ways we can give help to different products. We don't have to be there, put a request in, come and talk to us to see how we can help you every day. You know, it can be anything. We are happy to talk about the whole environment to teach if we need to, to make it better. Just come and talk to us, you know, we're a very friendly branch, you know, um, as most meteorologists, we do love our subject.
Flight Lieutenant Chris Sully: Excellent staff Flight Sergeant Peter Crooks from the Mobile Met Unit. Thank you for taking the time to talk, talk to inside here today.
Flight Sergeant Peter Crooks: I welcome. Thanks very much.
Corporal Victoria Andrews: With a look back at some recent new stories from the RAF, I'm Corporal Victoria Andrews. Icelandic airspace and arctic skies are being protected by F-35B fighter jets against Russian incursions. This as the UK takes its turn in NATO's rotational air policing mission in the region. To date, the mission has been carried out solely by aircraft operating from traditional air bases, but for the first time launching directly from the aircraft carrier, HMS Prince of Wales, the lightning stealth fighters are carrying out defensive patrols and standing by ready to scramble to defend the High North.
Arctic century was introduced by the alliance in February of this year to bring allied responses to activity in the region under a single coordinated framework, strengthening surveillance and defence across the High North. This in response to Russia, which has significantly expanded its military presence there by reopening Soviet era bases, extending naval patrols and testing new weapons systems.
The first of three new Airbus H145 Jupiter Mk2 helicopters, has completed its inaugural flight from RAF Akrotiri marking a step forward in the UK's crisis response capability in the Eastern Mediterranean. The arrival of the H145s establishes a 24 hours a day, 365 days a year response capability in Cyprus.
The H145 can adapt to a range of mission types, including aerial firefighting, intelligence gathering and search and rescue operations. They're expected to take over aerial firefighting efforts from the Chinooks currently stationed at RAF Akrotiri prior to next year's wildfire season.
And last month, RAF Halton saw the largest cohort of graduates since the pandemic finished their basic recruit training course. The milestone demonstrates the RAFs commitment to increasing training, capacity, growing operational capability, and delivering more personnel to the frontline at a time of heightened threats. The milestone reflects sustained efforts across the service to support the Royal Air Force endeavours to be ready to fly and fight. The Aviator Training Academy has steadily increased course sizes since the COVID-19 pandemic. That's reheat on inside Air.
Flight Lieutenant Chris Sully: Thanks, Vic. And now it's time to find out who's under the hat with Ben.
Air Specialist (Class 1) Ben Russell: I'm as one Ben Russel, and this is Under the Hat where we get to know an aviator in less than a minute. Name you are known by.
Flying Officer Andrew: Hello, I'm Flying Officer Andrew,
Air Specialist (Class 1) Ben Russell: what's your profession?
Flying Officer Andrew: I'm an identification officer in air space operations and I'm based in Swanwick in Southern England.
Air Specialist (Class 1) Ben Russell: What's the best thing about your job?
Flying Officer Andrew: Being in the know, I think about what's going on in the world before everybody else.
Air Specialist (Class 1) Ben Russell: Hardest part of your job,
Flying Officer Andrew: being in the know before everybody else and not being able to say anything.
Air Specialist (Class 1) Ben Russell: Best location you've served?
Flying Officer Andrew: Probably surprisingly, the Falkland. I did my deployment down there for four months in the summer and it was glorious, actually got sunburn.
Air Specialist (Class 1) Ben Russell: What bit of luxury kit do you never deploy without?
Flying Officer Andrew: I have learned to take my AeroPress coffee press. I went through phase one training with no coffee whatsoever and I never wanted to repeat that ever again.
Air Specialist (Class 1) Ben Russell: And what's your proudest moment in the RAF?
Flying Officer Andrew: Getting through phase one, actually, I went through as my, the oldest in the cohort as always quite pleased just to get through it and to achieve what I did.
Flight Lieutenant Chris Sully: That's all for this episode of Inside Air. I'm heading outside to check the weather now. Please give us a review, subscribe on your favourite podcast app and join us again soon.
Narrator: You've been listening to Inside Air, a 'behind-the-wire' view of the Royal Air Force; its people, technology, and operations. If you're serving in the RAF and have a story for us, please speak to your unit, media and communications officer.
Inside Air is written and produced for the Royal Air Force by RAF Media Reserves.
