Max (Celsius)

Min (Celsius)

Rainfall (mm)

AIRHEAD

27.1

20.1

3.4

GEORGETOWN

28.1

20.2

2.2

ST. HELENA

19.8

13.2

15.8

FALKLANDS

13.2

-0.9

2.8

UK (Brize Norton)

18.7

4.3

3.6

UK

Cold Artic air brought unsettled weather and strong winds to many, some fair weather in the south into the weekend but it was back to cloud and drizzle by Sunday.

Falklands

Sunny spells with showers and occasional strong winds. It probably felt cold though as I hear they turned off the heating on base. Lucky they are all tough down south!

Ascension

A rather cloudy and showery week with only fleeting glimpses of sun. The latter half of the week saw strong winds with a max gust of 37 mph on Friday.

St. Helena

A cloudy and unsettled week with frequent showers, hill fog and gusty strong winds.

Met offices around the world spend millions of pounds on new technologies each year to improve weather forecasts but every now and again a folksy method will come along that is claimed to be better than any super computer.

One of the best was George Wimsatt and his bear fat. Wimsatt was a Sacramento mountain man who heard of Native Americans using rendered bear far in water to predict the weather so in the 1930s he shot a bear and gave it a go himself. He watched the fat to see how it changed with the weather and by the end of the decade he could he could predict rainfall and temperature changes and became popular with local logging companies and farmers who would avoid getting their trucks stuck in the mud. Soon he could predict upper wind patterns and would regularly call his local air base telling them when not to launch, much to the annoyance of their station met man I’m sure. His fans would swear that his predictions were better than any professionals and by the early 40s he had experimented with other fats including cougar, human and turtle and had written papers on his technique. By the end of WW2 his bear fat could detect nuclear explosions around the world and in the mid 70s Wimsatt was using over 100 jars of bear grease to predict earthquakes. He successfully forecast the 1985 Mexico city quake that killed 3000 people and enjoyed a brief period of media interest. He died in 1995 but his followers continue his work.

I’ve never tried Wimsatt’s methods myself as I prefer using chicken bones or seaweed and the lack of bears on Ascension would suggest that I won’t be testing it anytime soon.