Profiles

Chris at the Lister Park weather station

Of course, it's a British tradition - if there's nothing else to talk about, there's always the weather. But Chris, who's a Parks Gardener at Lister Park, takes this to a whole new level. After all, he's the man who has one hundred years of Bradford's weather at his fingertips! If you're in the park at nine o'clock in the morning - any morning - he'll be the figure you'll see purposely striding towards a little fenced-off enclosure full of strange looking devices. He's been doing this for over three decades but shows as much enthusiasm for the job as ever!

Chris tests the wind direction

"This looks like a beehive," says Chris pointing to a slatted wooden box on legs in Lister Park's weather enclosure. "A lot of children think it's a beehive, but it isn't. It's a 'Stevenson's screen' and inside it houses some thermometers. There are four of them in there. There's a maximum and a minimum thermometer - obviously your maximum is a day behind because it's yesterday's maximum - and the minimum is for the same day as you're doing the readings. Then there are two upright thermometers - a 'hygrometer' and from that you can work out the humidity in the air."

It's from this box of tricks that Chris takes some of his weather readings, much as his predecessors have done every single day since 1st January 1908. Whatever the weather, somebody's been out in Lister Park to take note of what, meteorologically, has been going on. Come rain or shine, it's all been noted down and sent off to the Met Office - on paper and more recently online. The technology might have changed, but it's all still about the one thing that gets us all talking - the weather!

On the ground nearby are some more odd-looking things - easy to trip over, in fact, if you're not looking! Chris explains that they're more thermometers: "These go underground and are called earth thermometers. One of them is four feet deep and the other one is one foot deep. That one [the one foot earth thermometer] can get quite cold, near freezing, but if the other one gets freezing then it's the Ice Age!"

Simon checks the underground temperature

While Chris takes today's readings from the earth thermometer, his colleague Simon Drake appears. He's the Assistant Parks and Landscape Manager for Bradford and knowns a thing or two about the weather station too. Simon points out that taking note of weather at Lister Park isn't all about technology. Sometimes, he says, you have to rely on simpler ways of measuring the weather - like gauging wind speed and direction, for instance: "It's a matter of facing north and throwing something in the air and looking which way it falls! Also it's the observation of clouds, the direction the clouds are going. We also have a gauge for windspeed, the Beaufort Scale. You look at that with respect to flags extending, leaves and twigs in constant motion, trees bending. You can gauge it from that." Finished with his thermometers, Chris adds: "The Beaufort Scale goes right up to twelve although we don't get twelve inland as that's a hurricane. The most you'll get here is force eight or nine. I recorded force six this morning which is a strong breeze, but you don't record the gusts, you record the constant wind speed."

There are also some things that just can't really be measured properly by anything else than the human eye. Over 34 years, Chris has developed a few tricks of his own - including how to measure visibility, another important aspect of recording the weather: "You can tell if it's going to be a clear day or if it's going to be misty or foggy. What we have is six or seven different points. The first one is Hollins Hill, a few miles away, and it's the clearest point we can see today...Then we have, through the trees, a church spire and that's Heaton Church. If you can [only] see the church then it's fog. Then, you come back from looking there and there's Listers Mill chimney, the park boundary and the bandstand. If you can't see the bandstand then you'll be lost, basically!"

Chris looks at recent readings

Of course, all these readings have to go somewhere to be compiled with those from other weather stations across West Yorkshire, the UK and the world! Simon explains: "This is a Met Office station so all the information goes there. Now, the readings go electronically on a daily basis, but we used to send them on a monthly basis on a large sheet of paper...Then there's other stuff we put in the diary like cloud cover and so on...But the Met Office does get all our information. I also used to send a monthly record to Paul Hudson at the BBC but because he's got access to the Met Office site now, he just gets the information from there. But any observations that are out of the normal, like the lowest October temperature, I e-mail to Paul and sometimes he mentions that during his TV appearances."

Lister Park's very own weatherman Chris says he feels that the work he does at nine o'clock every morning really does help to build a picture of what's going on weather-wise in West Yorkshire: "Stations like this do help Paul Hudson and the Met Office to find out what the average temperatures are for an area. No matter what part of England you go to, the forecasters will say, 'The average temperature will be...' and it's little stations like this that help them know what that average temperature is, or the average rainfall."

Rainfall being one of this country's - and this county's - favourite talking points, this is a good chance for Chris to reveal some of the meteorological high and low points from the past 100 years. As far as rain's concerned, Chris doesn't have to look far through the records: "The wettest month we've ever had was June 2007. You'll remember all that flooding we had, well we had just over ten inches of rain that month. It outdoes any other month by two inches or so - ten and a quarter inches fell in one month. Quite a lot! Over the year, the highest rainfall we've had was 44.85 inches and that was in the year 2000, not so long ago either." And what about temperature? Well, it was in the 1950s that the mercury rose the highest: "The last warmest maximum was 31.1 degrees Celsius [88 degrees Fahrenheit] and that was on 12th August 1953 so you're going back a long time. A more recent one, well there aren't any really. They all go back to the 1940s and 1950s for warm temperatures. The past really was a lot warmer. As far as the coldest minimum temperatures are concerned, obviously they'll be night temperatures and it was -13.9 Celsius on 21st January 1940, that's only seven degrees Fahrenheit. Very, very cold for a night temperature."

Weather symbols surround the equipment

During his time taking the weather readings at Lister Park, Chris has also noticed certain trends: "We're getting warmer winters and they're a lot wetter. I've noticed over the years that the monthly averages are getting slightly warmer, especially in winter." Chris also echoes what many of us have noticed - snow seems to be increasingly a rarity: "We don't seem to get the falls like we did 20 or 30 years ago. I can remember when I was a kid going out and you were up to your neck in snow. These days it comes one day and it's gone the next!"

With that, it's time for Chris to return to his other tasks around Lister Park. Over three decades since he started taking the daily readings, he still clearly relishes his part in making sure that West Yorkshire's weather is noted down for posterity. No wonder, then, that he was recently presented with a plaque marking the weather station's centenary. And who better to present it than BBC Yorkshire's very own weatherman Paul Hudson! So, next time you're in Lister Park at nine o'clock in the morning, why not keep a weather eye out for Chris just like he's been doing for the past 34 years?

Want to find out what the weather was like at Lister Park any day in the past 100 years? The information is now live at www.bradford.gov.uk! Click on the link below to find out if it was cold comfort, heavy weather or wall-to-wall sunshine anytime between 1908 and the present day...