For many of us, snow is synonymous with Christmas. Bing Crosby famously dreamt of it, while movies, advent calendars and Christmas cards are all decorated with snow-filled scenes of a white Christmas.
But snow is increasingly rare at Christmas, and did you know you’re more likely to see snow at Easter than at Christmas? In fact, the last time we had a widespread snow event in the UK was 2010 when the whole country was under a blanket of snow. Remember that?
As a meteorologist, predicting the weather is a fine art. There are essentially three stages to it: in order to know what the weather will do today or tomorrow, we first need to know what it is doing now. Observations are taken from land, sea and air (satellites, radar, aircraft) and pumped into the supercomputer, the second stage.
This supercomputer takes the observations as ‘initial conditions’ and uses clever maths and physics equations (performing 14,000 trillion calculations per second!) to predict where the weather will move and how it will evolve. The third stage is where the humans come in, as the meteorologists interpret that data, make necessary adjustments and communicate their conclusions with the public.
Accuracy in weather forecasting has improved significantly over the past few decades. In my twelve years working for the Met Office, the Global Model has increased its resolution from 40KM to 10KM and now it predicts the track of storms across the UK with incredible accuracy and good lead time.
I was on shift during Storm Eunice in February 2022. It led to gale force winds across Southern England, the path it took modelled with remarkable accuracy from its infancy 5 days earlier in the Atlantic.
But there are, of course, times we get it wrong, and I’ve had that sinking feeling as the fog rolls in and you want the ground to swallow you up.
People often joke with us about ‘controlling the weather’ but as a Christian I believe that, ultimately, God is in control of it down to the finest detail of when each raindrop will fall. None of this takes him by surprise! And the same is true in life. We can make plans: what job to take, where to live, who to marry, but sometimes our plans don’t work out as we envisaged.
Disappointments come in various forms and things happen that we just can’t predict. There are times I am looking into the fog, unsure how things are going to pan out but it gives me great confidence that my Father God knows the future and I am safe in his hands with whatever is coming next.
As Hebrews 11:1 in the Bible says “Faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.”
Article by Andrew, Tilehurst