The Weather Obsession

‘Wilde called it the last refuge of the unimaginative but 120 years on, conversation about the weather has made a big comeback. Climate change, technical innovation, social media, stormchasers—Zion deals with them all. Read this book. Oh, and don’t forget to pack your brolly.’

Santo Cilauro

THE

WEATHER

OBSESSION

LAWRIE ZION

MELBOURNE UNIVERSITY PRESS

An imprint of Melbourne University Publishing Limited

Level 1, 715 Swanston Street, Carlton, Victoria 3053, Australia

mup-info@unimelb.edu.au

www.mup.com.au

First published 2017

Text © Lawrie Zion, 2017

Design and typography © Melbourne University Publishing Limited, 2014

This book is copyright. Apart from any use permitted under the Copyright Act 1968 and subsequent amendments, no part may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means or process whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publishers.

Every attempt has been made to locate the copyright holders for material quoted in this book. Any person or organisation that may have been overlooked or misattributed may contact the publisher.

The extract on p. 8 is reproduced courtesy of the estate of Dorothea Mackellar. The extract on p. 9 and the first extract on p. 105 is reproduced courtesy of The Age. The extracts on pp. 42 and 121 are reproduced courtesy of Fairfax Media. The extracts on pp. 74, 102–3, 105 (second extract), 111, 123, 127 and 141–3 are reproduced courtesy of News Corp. The extract on p.122 is reproduced courtesy of Huffington Post Australia. The extracts on pp. 132 and 133 are reproduced courtesy of Heidi Cullen.

Text design and typesetting by Megan Ellis

Cover design by Design by Committee

Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

The weather obsession/Lawrie Zion.

9780522868418 (paperback)

9780522868425 (ebook)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Weather forecasting—Australia.

Weather radar networks—Australia.

Weather forecasting—Data processing.

Social media.

CONTENTS

List of acronyms

1Plugged into the weather

2The evolution of weather media

3Bureau of Meteorology revisited

4Catastrophic

5The weather zone

6Citizen weather

7Just do the weather

8The weather becomes the news

9Media storm

10 The long-term forecast

Notes

Acknowledgements

Bibliography

Index

LIST OF ACRONYMNS

1  

PLUGGED INTO THE WEATHER

Full disclosure: I am a weather tragic. I have, since the age of five, been completely obsessed with the weather. The trigger, as I recall it, is also one of my earliest memories. I woke up one morning to see my suburban Melbourne street covered in a white blanket that I assumed to be snow. It turned out that there had been a hailstorm, and the ice soon melted. But at that moment I was captivated by nature’s special effects.

As soon as I could read I developed a newspaper habit that began with the weather pages, intrigued by not just the forecasts, but also the maps. To the surprise of my family I insisted, at the age of eight, that we get The Australian delivered because it was the only paper that featured detailed weather forecasts for all capital cities. I also watched the weather reports at the end of every TV news bulletin, listened to them on the radio and, if home from school, the broadcasts of the rainfall and river heights every day at twelve minutes to two. My idea of a fun day out was a trip with Mum to the Bureau of Meteorology’s Melbourne office, where I would be given photocopies of monthly weather almanacs and climate stats by attentive, if bemused staff.

It’s quite possible that I was the only nine-year-old who knew how unusual it was for Melbourne to have a 90-degree day (Fahrenheit; 32°C) in the second half of April. Yet what might have seemed like a peculiar hobby turned out to be not so strange. Even author Mark Twain, a critic of the overblown weather clichés that appeared in so many nineteenth-century novels, conceded back in 1892 that weather is necessary to a narrative of human experience. Here in the twenty-first century, weather remains a part of our social lubrication, our identity, and it is central to how we live.

‘Weather is ideally suited to the electronic age,’ wrote Bernard Mergen, a Professor of American Studies, in his 2008 book Weather Matters. ‘It’s constantly in motion, frequently fast moving … ubiquitous and visually beautiful.’

And it’s in this digital age that our interest in the elements is being turbocharged by the growth of weather-related media, especially online. To misquote Prime Minister Turnbull, there has never been a more exciting time to be obsessed with the weather. But how is digital media reflecting and shaping the ways we connect to the weather, and our attempts to accommodate its extremes? Is it fulfilling some innate need, or engaging us in entirely new ways? These are the questions we will explore in this book.

The traces we leave on the internet often reveal insights about how and why we engage with the weather. Australians search online for weather more than we search for sex. According to Google, ‘sex’ was a much more popular search term than ‘weather’ in 2004. But by the beginning of 2017, ‘weather’ outstripped ‘sex’ by a ratio of four to one—a trend replicated in several other western countries.¹

Bureau of Meteorology (Bureau/BoM) user surveys illustrate in more general (if less graphic) detail the extent to which online is now the go-to destination for weather. In 2005–06, just 39 per cent of us turned to the internet to find weather information—that was less than television (90%), newspapers (65%) and radio (56%). A decade later, the proportion of Australians using the internet to find weather information had more than doubled to 80 per cent. Even so, broadcast remains important: 71 per cent were still getting forecasts on television and 66 per cent via radio. But, as a sign of the times, just 24 per cent of Australians turned to newspapers, the only one of these four platforms that can’t tell you what’s actually happening now.

These figures only really capture what we actively seek. Most of us also absorb weather information passively. Think of the temperature updates that beam at us every time we turn on our mobile devices, the embedded forecasts on news and social media sites, or the electronic tickers that pervade everything from cars to elevators.

While more weather information is now produced and packaged by private companies such as Weatherzone, the shift to online is best illustrated by the growing popularity of the Bureau’s website. Launched in 1996, when only around 300,000 Australians were using the internet at home,² the site now attracts over 1.5 billion unique page views a year. That’s an average of two page views a day for the entire population. In January 2017 it was ranked the twentieth most-visited site in Australia, and by far the most popular government site.³ That’s an average of two page views a day for the entire population.

Its status as the place to go for weather information has been driven in part by the growing understanding that forecasters have of how the weather actually works. As senior forecaster Philip King says, ‘We can explain things and talk about them because we’ve learned about them.’⁴ This is reflected in the high level of public confidence in the quality of the information that it provides. The BoM, as so many of us like to call it, is part of our everyday lives, and we like it like that. According to Bureau surveys, 90 per cent of us are satisfied or very satisfied with the accuracy, coverage and timelines of its weather and marine forecasting services.⁵ And, of course, there is so much more on the site than the daily forecasts.

For many people, this information is critical to economic success. All up, nearly a quarter of our gross domestic product is weather sensitive.⁶ When farmers check the forecasts or the radar, they aren’t just trying to figure out what to wear; they’re relying on them to make strategic planning decisions. Accurate weather information also means that cyclones don’t strike without warning, and decision-making in the rural, mining and energy sectors is better informed.

Research focusing on how we engage with weather information points to much more than economic utility. In 2009, 53 per cent of Australians were checking the forecasts daily, and 90 per cent at least once a week.⁷ And it’s not just Australians who are obsessed. A 2012 survey conducted in the United States by the Pew Research Center found that weather was the most followed topic of local news, ahead of breaking news, politics, and crime.⁸

In Britain, where the outdoors is not to be negotiated unprepared, the majority of two thousand adults surveyed by the Met Office (the equivalent of our Bureau) reported that they checked the weather either within an hour of getting up or before leaving the house in the morning.⁹ Another finding was that British adults talk about the weather on average six times a week. For women, it is the topic they talk about more frequently than anything else (68%). In fact, Brits talk more regularly about the weather than ‘money (44%), relationships (37%) and even celebrity gossip (15%)’.

To what extent do the climates we live in determine our interest in the weather? A team of American researchers, led by Alan E. Stewart, has tried to measure weather ‘salience’—the level at which we engage with the weather, and how it differs between regions. They found that people in temperate or variable climates are more likely to seek out weather information than people in dry climates.¹⁰ British research also points to changeable weather being a consistent theme of ‘weather talk’.

In Australia, which has as much diversity in its climate as in its population, this might help explain why Melbourne’s notoriously mercurial climate has inspired so much banter, not to mention the classic Crowded House song, ‘Four Seasons in One Day’. As cricket journalist Bharat Sundaresan noted in The Indian Express while covering the 2014–15 Australia v. India test series, ‘You’ll … hardly find an Aussie who doesn’t have the weather app on his/her smart phone. Melbourne is the clear winner on this front. The city with four weathers in a day obviously has the most number of experts.’¹¹

A more (literally) edifying expression of Melbourne’s climate is a new apartment tower in the city’s Docklands precinct, which has been designed to respond to the city’s weather conditions. Every night its exterior is illuminated by vertical beams of LEDs that display weather forecasts taken from a monitoring station on the roof of the building that works with data from the Bureau.¹² The artist responsible for the installation, Canadian-born Bruce Ramus, is a lighting designer who wanted to design something that Melburnians could connect with and that hadn’t been done anywhere else. ‘I’ve really been struck, some people call it obsessed, by how occupied people are with the actual weather … I’ve started to get how the weather patterns really influence how people [in Melbourne] live,’ he said in an interview.¹³

Sydney-based artist and musician Angela Garrick’s ‘Weather Vent’ project delved into how we feel about the weather from another angle. Deploying ‘old media’ technologies that are becoming increasingly obsolete, she placed classified advertisements in regional newspapers around Australia, offering ‘a professional service’ for people to express their frustrations about the weather, and inviting them to leave their contributions on an answering machine. In what proved to be a telling sign of how media consumption habits have changed, she soon noticed the difficulties of attracting responses without resorting to the internet, and duly adjusted her recruitment process.¹⁴ The feedback was curated into an inventory of whinge and whimsy and presented as an installation at the Cross Arts Gallery in Sydney in 2016. As one respondent volunteered, ‘What’s with this weather? I expect at this time of the year to have a cold due to the changing season or hay fever; not because the air conditioning is turned up so high it feels like it should be snowing!’ Another sounded off more succinctly: ‘Hello. I’d like to complain about the weather. It’s absolutely bloody hot right now.’

At a time when the media presents weather in increasingly technological terms, the sheer ordinariness of these deadpan statements provides refreshing illustrations of how we connect to it on a primal level. The responses also illustrate how much of our weather talk can seem repetitive and banal. But Swinburne University psychology professor Greg Murray says that there is nothing inherently trivial about such utterances. Murray, who is an expert in a type of (non-meteorological) depression known as seasonal affective disorder, argues that our interest in the weather is innate and a good thing, and that weather talk is a recognised social dialogue that everyone wants to be a part of. ‘It’s a fundamental glue, and the technologically fuelled increase of weather information can be compared to the rise of the Fitbit. There are weather events which might move this particular social dialogue up the importance rating, and of course nobody would want to be outside the loop of that.’¹⁵ Indeed, if we didn’t use talking about the weather as a social convention, he would encourage it. What better way to find common ground that expands out to personal and public things?

While much of our weather talk is about what we’re experiencing today, or whether the weekend will be wet or dry, weather events can also loom large in our memories, and even provide a way of structuring our understanding of the past, says Trevor Harley, who heads the School of Psychology at the University of Dundee and blogs about British weather. His research suggests that, like nostalgia, the way we remember weather events is often flawed, (those long sunny summers we used to have might be more nostalgic prop than meteorological fact) but can still play a symbolic role in our personal narratives.¹⁶ Could I have misremembered the hailstorm of my childhood that triggered my own weather obsession?

Australian historian Tim Sherratt also addresses the theme of memory in A Change in the Weather, a collection of essays exploring climate and culture in Australia. Weather is how we experience nature on an everyday basis, he points out. And significant weather events become ‘a matter for comment and concern, as each event is catalogued and compared—the biggest in fifty years, the worst for a generation, perhaps even a turning point in the nation’s progress,’ he says. ‘But while such events stick in our memories, climate and memory never coincide, simply because memory is not an average of the past … Memory generates meaning, not statistics.’¹⁷

What will become of our weather memories in the future? Not only do more of us experience what seems to be a growing number of severe weather events, but so many of our reactions to them are recorded in the information and images we share on social media, which has become the new barometer of our engagement with weather in all its forms. Thanks to Twitter, we can see how a severe March hailstorm in Dubbo created a novel opportunity to chill the beer outside with an improvised esky. And from the moment that a looming tornado was photographed near the Tullamarine airport in Melbourne on 5 November 2015, Twitter became a platform for both meteorological information and irreverent piss-takes. ‘If Sydney had a tornado it would become a Hollywood blockbuster. Melbourne has a tornado and it will become a community art performance,’ was one response. Disaster-themed memes soon followed, including photos of plastic outdoor furniture with one chair overturned on the ground, accompanied by the caption: ‘Melbourne Tornado 2015—We Will Rebuild.’

Social media has also become a critical platform for the dissemination of warnings and updates. Twitter, though barely ten years old, and originally intended for nothing more than ephemeral conversations, has evolved into an archive of much of our mediated lives, including weather events. Type #CycloneYasi, for instance, and you’ll see a rich repository of thousands of tweets in reverse chronological order describing the impact of the severe category five tropical cyclone that devastated coastal communities on the north Queensland coast in February 2011.

While social media is aggregating fascinating accounts of our contemporary weather conversations, Indigenous Australians have adapted to the climate for more than 50,000 years, during which time they developed an understanding of their local climatic patterns. Scholars now believe that their observations of seasonal change ‘have the potential to fill gaps in climate data for tropical northern Australia, and could also serve to inform culturally appropriate adaptation strategies.’¹⁸

For Europeans who colonised the continent and their descendants, it is a single line from an early-twentieth-century poem that provides the most discernible narrative thread to what comes closest to a national experience of the weather—the enormous variation in rainfall from year to year. In 1904, when she was just nineteen and homesick in London, Dorothea Mackellar wrote ‘My Country’. Its second stanza began:

I love a sunburnt country

A land of sweeping plains,

Of ragged mountain ranges,

Of droughts and flooding rains.

The last line here has gone on to resonate through Australian culture: it’s the title for a book, an art exhibition, and even a commemorative coin.¹⁹ And that, to use a metaphor that may appear somewhat inappropriate in this context, is just the tip of the iceberg.

As author and critic Clive James noted in an article about the poem, ‘the first four lines of the stanza are the bit that everybody knows, partly because they are so addictively crafted, and partly because they fit the national experience of what Australia’s geography and climate are actually like.’²⁰ For scientist Greg McKeon: ‘Australia’s climate and its year-to-year variability in rainfall could well claim to be a major determining factor in the development of this national identity and the attitude to the future.’²¹

At the time that Mackellar wrote ‘My Country’, Australia was still recovering from the ravages of the extended Federation drought, but the role played by climate drivers was not understood. It is only in the last forty years that climate scientists have successfully demonstrated the extent to which rainfall variability in Australia is linked to the strong influence of meteorological mechanisms associated with the phases of the El Nino–Southern Oscillation (ENSO).

Nowadays, the ‘droughts and flooding rains’ motif is often associated with El Nino stories in the media. As one 2015 ABC news item began: ‘Scientists are tipping this year’s forecast