THE WEATHER FORECAST FOR D-DAY

WHEN THE MET OFFICE WAS A SERIOUS SCIENTIFIC BODY

I can’t be certain but I’m almost sure that the chap standing in the right foreground is my grandfather, the meteorologist Oliver Graham Sutton. This is the famous weather forecast which showed a window on 6th June 1944 for D-Day, delaying it 24 hours. The Germans assumed nothing could happen - and Rommel was even back in Berlin, for his wife’s birthday.

Sir O. G. Sutton was later Director General of the Met Office and had a fascinating war-time career. Originally a mathematician, he became an atmospheric physicist and pioneered micrometeorology, the study of the atmosphere very close to the earth’s surface. In fact, I’ve even used the equations he devised for how emissions diffuse from a chimney, when I did pollution modelling for British Gas.

He was the weather expert and director of the famous anthrax bomb tests, on the Scottish island of Gruinard. Easy to criticise those now - and we in fact never used the hideous stuff - but at the time, the country faced the real risk of Nazi invasion. There was intelligence to show the Germans were planning to use biological weapons and Churchill ordered a fast investigation by the team at Porton Down, which Sutton headed.

ANTHRAX ISLAND

My father recalled him being absent for almost a year early in the 1940s then returning with a huge beard, as a stranger at their front door in Salisbury. Apparently Dad ran away terrified to my grandmother!