David Carrington, the man behind the Wroxall Weather website.
WIGHT LIVINGEVERYONE has a tale to tell about the Great Storm.
It underlined not only the power of nature but man’s inability not to be able to do much else other than watch when faced with winds gusting to hurricane force.
The storm ended some lives and changed others. Among those whose lives would never the same was David Carrington’s.
He was at Sandown High School when the Great Storm sparked the start of his romance with the weather.
His interest had been whetted by the last ‘real’ snow the Island had, seven years before, in the winter of 1980. As children, he and his sister, Mandy, were fascinated by a cool 1ft of the white stuff descending on the Wight.
His was to prove a lasting and ever more engaging elemental love affair that was to blossom into Wroxall Weather by the time Dave moved in to the village in his early thirties.
www.wroxall-weather.co.uk is an ever-expanding conglomerate of forecasts, statistics, surface pressure charts, jet stream projections and sea-level isobars.
It will tell you just what’s what on the weather front, everything you need to know about the Great British talking point — and much more besides.
It started with a page on the worldwide web and developed into 140 odd. It is growing like the proverbial topsy to the point where it now gets 15,000 ‘hits’ a week.
He is a fan of weather extremes, to the degree that he has just incorporated into his website the Centre for Severe Weather Research.
Dust devils, hail the size of golf balls, an inch of precipitation in half an hour, fog that freezes on your glasses, in fact all weather phenomena are welcome to contribute to building a complete weather picture for the Island.
It is aimed at recording Islanders’ experiences of severe weather, in photographs, videos, stories and reports.
As Dave tells us on his site: “This completely new area is another first for the Island, brought to you by Wroxall Weather, in association with the IW Weather Centre. This part of the site, with your help, will take the next 30 years to complete.
“Please bear with us over the next few months as we try to get our heads around the huge amount of work that’s to be done.
“A whole new department has been set up here at the weather centre, with its own resources to handle the workload.”
It sounds part of a grand design but it’s more a case of Dave, or his old schoolchum from Sandown High, Paul Wood, doing yet more weather work.
Dave’s pretty busy as it is with the weather and, as climate change accelerates the yo-yo between extremes, is likely to be ever more so.
As we hang onto our broken brollies, wade through the deluged streets, watch the ferries bob like corks or tend our Mediterranean drought-resistant gardens, Dave will be rubbing his hands with slightly abashed glee.
And he’s likely to be ever-more gleeful.
Just days ago, in what was described as a watershed moment, more than 2,500 leading environmental experts agreed a statement that called on governments to act before the planet becomes an unrecognisable — and, in places, impossible — place to live.
At an emergency climate summit in Copenhagen, scientists agreed that worst-case scenarios were already becoming reality and that unless drastic action was taken soon, dangerous climate change was imminent.
There was significant risk of irreversible climatic shifts, the academics concluded.
You can bet your maximum and minimum thermometer that down in Wroxall’s West Street Dave will be charting every degree the temperature goes up and millimetre falls in his rain-gauge.
Dave still has the old rain-gauge glasses and mercury thermometers in his garden, inspection of which are a ritual start to his days.
His equipment is lined up with that of his gaggle of six children, aged between two and 14, who he tries to interest in what has developed into far more than a hobby, to what he hopes is an embryonic business.
Wroxall Weather has a cute sunrise logo that you can find on its mug and T-shirt marketing material but at the minute precious little else that would yield a crust.
Weather is bread and butter to Dave.
“It’s my breakfast, lunch and dinner,” he proclaims, admitting that to his wife, Emma, weather is more of a snack to be taken in light bites on the Discovery Channel.
Out in his garden sits a Vantage Pro mk II, a state-of-the-art weather station that will record everything from dew drop and leaf moisture to torrent and temperatures in the extreme.
The information from the piece of weather kit is faithfully relayed via specialised software to Wroxall Weather’s website that is constantly updated with a stream of weather stuff.
Added to that is the live wi-fi link with his weather cam, casting its weather eye out from the downs. Whether you be sweltering in Spain or freezing in Finland you can see Wroxall’s weather.
There, Dave is quick to point out, it can be radically different to other parts of our tiny isle and more especially to what the south coast is getting.
Dave’s collection and dissemination of information in ever greater depth comes at a time when national newspapers, which used to record how many hours of sunshine there were in Sandown, Shanklin, Ventnor and Ryde, don’t even mention the Island at all.
Dave plans to assemble a battery of statistical data to enable direct comparison with our south coast cousins, to determine whether the description Sunshine Isle is myth or magic.
A favourite Carrington illustration of the difference a few feet can make is that one day rain was beating against his Wroxall front door while all was fine out back.
The records he is assembling are both relatively historic and modern.
Just a couple of weeks ago he made contact with a weather enthusiast with a loft full of statistical information that would otherwise, without someone like Dave, probably have died with the owner.
He’s constantly on the look out for more records and would be delighted to hear if anyone knows the whereabouts of Binstead weather statistician Ken Hosking’s mighty collection of weatherabilia.
As Dave says: “I can’t get enough of it. I just hope that one day it might make me a living.”
Reporter:
richardw@iwcpmail.co.uk