ISSN 1758-6488
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From 'Edgelands' Non-fiction |
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The site is dominated by a 29-metre mast, secured with metal hawsers, a lone starling singing at its tip; an O2 mobile mast – smaller, railed off and crowned in smaller dishes, screens and spiky aerials like a metal fetish statue – squats in its shadow, a shadow that, when the sun is low, you can imagine needling across miles of open country. We begin our rounds.
Climate is recorded slowly, over time, an imperceptible, glacial drip. A weather station, looked at closely from the ground, might also record our capacity for imagining and test our ability to wonder. Memories of long-ago freezing bored field trips are perhaps re-engaged; a horror of clipboards. It just looks like a scattering of vaguely familiar but oddly abstract constructions. The turf-wall rain gauge, a bricked-off, circular indentation a few feet in diameter with some kind of nozzle or aperture at its centre, like a small civic fountain that has dried up and grassed over; anemometers spinning slowly like failed garden appliances; a brick plinth like a deluded, low-level trig point, or a garden centre altar to sun worship.
The imperatives of global warming mean that amateur weather enthusiasts – previously bracketed with other British eccentrics like collectors of jam labels or men with narrow-gauge railways in their back gardens – are now feted as eco-heroes. Kids make simple rainfall gauges at primary school and set them up in the back garden. Pensioners hang thermometers outside the kitchen window, and peer out in the morning to read the mercury. But amateur forecasters no longer need rely on barometers like wall clocks, tapping on the glass each time they pass. Now high-street stores sell digital home weather stations, complete with read-outs of temperature, humidity, pressure and a handy icon like the TV weather forecast to tell you whether cloud, rain or sun is on its way. Some even have an audible storm warning, to wake you in the middle of the night so you can watch a storm. Not only do these home weather stations tell you the temperature in your kitchen, they also include at least one external sensor, to be nailed to the wall of your shed, which sends constant readings back to your kitchen to keep you abreast of any changes.
For an amateur weather enthusiast to make the news, though, they need to be a cut above the average record-keeper. In the mid-Noughties a retired paper-maker from Kirkcaldy made the newspapers when the Royal Meteorological Society got interested in his notebooks. Mr David Grisenthwaite had kept a detailed record of when he had cut the grass in his garden for the previous twenty years. The story these records told – that the grass-cutting period had extended by a month in two decades – has become part of the scientific debate on the pace and implications of climate change.
But Mr Grisenthwaite is not alone in his rigorous record-keeping. The science of phenology is enjoying a boom at the moment. Phenology is the study of the seasonal patterns of weather, plant and animal life, which is rooted in long-term and accurate keeping of as many records as possible. In autumn 2000 the UK Phenology Network was set up by the Woodland Trust and the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology to promote this amateur record-keeping to as wide an audience as possible. They now have upwards of 50,000 recruits keeping records: the first flowering of horse chestnut, first flowering of hawthorn, first arrival of swallow, first recorded flight of orange-tip butterfly.
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