In message , Martin Rowley
writes

"Wijke" wrote in message
...
snip
The KNMI, and other weather-institutes, simply explain things like
this. Our
weatherguys/ -women really are educators :-).

... yes, we don't seem to do very well at this - and yet it wasn't
always so. Probably dates from the days of fronts becoming 'weather
fronts' and (sshhhhh), don't mention the isobar! (it's a tramline). We
had a weather 'club' at school and used to post daily weather summaries
and publish seasonal reports in the school mag. (and no, this wasn't a
Public School - a County Secondary Modern with an enlightened Geography
master!). You would think from all the interesting weather events of
recent years that meteorology (as opposed to 'phew, wot a scorcher'
stories) would figure more prominently - I offered a few years ago to go
into my son's school to talk about 'the weather' and perhaps get some of
the youngsters interested, but there was no interest and I abandoned it
after a couple of attempts.

The Geography Master I had at Ardrossan Academy in 1959-61 had
previously been a Forecaster in the Met Office. He was a weather
enthusiast and brought his enthusiasm into the lessons (quite outside of
the curriculum, I'm sure). He taught us the synoptic code and the basics
of meteorological analysis and forecasting. Thanks to him, by the age of
16 I could plot the observations on a surface chart and carry out a
passable analysis. These were useful skills that I took with me when I
joined the Met Office as an Assistant in 1961, especially as I wasn't
sent on an Initial Training Course until about 18 months after I joined.

Norman.
--
Norman Lynagh