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Weather forecasts by professional meteorologists are about 80% accurate. Robert Butler goes for a walk with the hobbyist who does better ...

From INTELLIGENT LIFE magazine, September/October 2011

It was a conference at the Royal Meteorological Society in Reading. An audience of academics and meteorologists—amateur and professional—had spent the first part of a Saturday morning listening, fairly dutifully, to PhD students discussing media representations of climate change and then representations of climate change in museum collections in the East Midlands. After that, a man in his 70s got up—cheery, pugnacious, and distinctly non-academic—and told us what the weather would be like for the rest of the year. And the year after that. He said his predictions were 90% right. More and more people in the audience started taking notes. They had holidays to think of.

David King doesn’t follow the weather forecasts on TV or radio. And he isn’t a scientist. What he has is a system, the sort of single-minded system someone might have devised for betting on racehorses. There are four main strands. He has his own notes that he has kept since the 1970s; he has maps charting the movement of the moon; he has a comprehensive list of sayings about the weather, or weather lore, often connected to saints’ days; and he has his own close observations from his walks in the Kent countryside. He watches how flies and ants are behaving, when birds arrive and depart, and when seeds, nuts and fruit first appear. He collects this information and cross-checks each observation with the other sources. This allows him to weed out those bits of weather lore, for instance, that are “bad uns”. Over nearly 40 years of keeping notes, he has found the ones that are most reliable.

He used to get it 82% right, but now, as the decades of notes pile up and his knowledge has grown more compendious, he has narrowed the margin of error by another 8%. Imagine if the forecasts on television were as reliable. Local farmers contact him to find out when the harvest will be, schools consult him about big days in their calendar and couples seek his advice for the right weekend to pick for their wedding. Even Clarence House had been in touch, through an intermediary, about Wills’ and Kate’s big day.

His secret? “It’s the little things,” he tells the audience. “People look, but they don’t see.” Afterwards he offered to take me for a walk and show me what he meant.

There’s no question David King is a details man. His follow-up e-mail gave instructions about switching platforms at East Croydon (“the train you require is the UCKFIELD train and these go at 23 and 53 minutes past the hour—but after 7pm there are variations”) and he tells me what he’ll be wearing when we meet (“blue shorts and a T-shirt with a faded blue baseball cap and sunglasses on my head”). He suggested an early visit as he thought the weather would change later in the week. It did.

He lives in Edenbridge, close to Gatwick airport. As we walk down the high street, he explains that the area is a designated flood plain. When too much water flows down from the North Downs, it is retained in the fields round here rather than flooding the homes of people in Tonbridge. For that reason, no building development is allowed. As we follow the River Eden from one spectacular open field to the next, it’s as if the whole area has been set aside as a site of special scientific interest.

The walk was like a private natural-history programme. David King pointed out the greengages, sloes, crab apples and hazelnuts, the chiffchaffs and buntings, the swan and the cormorant, and the burdocks and teazles. He described one hedge, full of sloes and nuts, as “like a fridge for the winter”. All this bounty, he said, suggested it was going to be a cold, hard winter. “Nature looks after its own.” In his view, nature has an intelligence that is working ahead of us. If you know where to look, you can see what’s going to happen.

He hadn’t heard the cuckoo since Monday (two days earlier), so there was a sign that the warm spell was about to break (as it did). It was important to see how high the birds were flying and how low the flies were keeping. More immediately, he said, pointing up at the mackerel sky, the weather this morning was about to change. I was now looking at the dozen fields around us in an entirely different way—part trainspotter, part Sherlock Holmes.

As we crossed a field of barley he told me meteorologists should get away from their computer screens, step outside and look at the world around them. Hard to argue with that on a beautiful sunny day like this. Scientists at another conference had told him to “put up or shut up”. So he sent them his predictions, which were overwhelmingly right. The one factor he couldn’t accommodate in his predictions was El Niño. “That’s above my pay grade.”

After the walk, we go back to his house on a 1960s housing estate. There are vines growing in the small conservatory and his back garden, the size of a caravan, is choc-a-bloc with flowers, herbs and meteorological instruments. He opens his notebook and writes down a dozen details from our walk, such as the time the wind became “noticeable”. And then, over a glass of cloudy lemonade, he tells me about his career.

He joined the police in south London when he was 19. It was his work as a copper on the beat that taught him how to notice things, how to talk to people and find things out. For a while, he did nights in a squad car (“a jam sandwich”) with another policeman who had been in the RAF, who taught him about the stars, the moon and the sky. His career in the police came to an abrupt end on the day after another royal wedding, that of Charles and Diana in 1981. He was set upon and badly beaten up (“kicked down the street” in his words) when making an arrest. He adds he never let go of the suspect till help had arrived. As soon as the doctor saw him he told him his days as a policeman were over. It took him five years to recover.

It was these two factors—his experience as a policeman and his inability to go very far—that led him to take an interest in his immediate surroundings. He talked to local farmers, found out what was going on, and kept finding himself disappointed by the weather forecasts. He started taking an almost obsessive interest in weather lore. Now that he’s a widower, he’ll think nothing of setting off at 6am to drive to Exeter and visit the Met Office library, which opens at ten.

All the readings from his weather instruments in the garden go onto the computer and he feeds the results through to the Met Office. He’s part of a wide range of amateur meteorologists whose data helps give the Met Office a denser, richer record of the weather. There have been great figures, from George Washington to Thomas Jefferson, who have been amateur meteorologists, but today this is a hobby with an image problem. Its practitioners tend to be middle-aged and male and have sheds at the end of the garden. As one of the other speakers at the Reading conference said, “I’m not an anorak because...” He paused. “Because...” He paused. “I’m not.” But David King is no anorak. Someone should give him a slot on TV.

Robert Butler is a former theatre critic of the Independent on Sunday. He blogs on the arts and the environment at AshdenDirectory.org.uk.

Illustration by Kathryn Rathke