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The weather forecast for the D-Day invasion of Normandy in June 1944 was one of the most critical pieces of information in modern times. The military question – when to launch the amphibious and air attack – depended on scientific issues not well understood at the time. The multinational team of forecasters who unpicked those issues were often at loggerheads.

That tension provides the essential drama of my new novel Turbulence. It was quite a departure for me (the novel took seven years to write) and also something of a risk. I had written about war before, in The Last King of Scotland and other books, but D-Day was such a big, well covered topic. Yet, as I discovered, the forecasters whose role was so crucial had to some extent been sidelined, both from history itself and from other novels. 

I couldn’t say exactly what the reason for this is, but I suspect it has to do with two things. The first is that what the forecasters were doing was very complex and hard to reduce to either historical or dramatic narrative (that was one of the challenges I faced as an author). The second was that it might seem invidious to focus on backroom boys when it was the men on the ground who gave their lives that fateful summer 65 years ago.

One thing we know for sure: a lot more people would have died if the forecast had been less accurate than it was. In the event, it was only just right. In putting off – in unimaginably tense circumstances – the invasion originally planned for 5 June and deciding to go the next day, James Stagg, Irv Krick, Sverre Pettersen and the other forecasters were extremely brave. 

There had previously been many other occasions when weather played a pivotal role in war, from Agamemnon’s supposed delaying, because of adverse winds, the embarkation of his navy at the start of the Trojan War in 1220BC, to Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow in 1812, in which thousands of men were frozen in snowdrifts. What was important about the D-Day forecast was the central role of professional meteorology, which was still a relatively new discipline. With the best science of the time at their disposal, Stagg and his team had to test the limits of prediction. Eisenhower needed at least five days to launch the invasion, but most of the team believed you could only forecast two to three days ahead, and were divided on how to do this.

Historical novels of the type I write are all about the traction you get from retrospection. The main point here is that these scientists were listened to. That is something we need to do again in the era of climate change. Doing it is concerned with giving scientists proper recognition, which brings me to another aspect of my novel. It involves a man called Lewis Fry Richardson, and the theory of how weather is moved around, that is to say, turbulence. I had no idea of the deep fascination I would find in this topic, which has foxed far greater minds than mine. Einstein himself is reputed to have said: ‘Before I die, I hope someone will clarify quantum physics for me. After I die, I hope God will explain turbulence to me.’ 

Though many of the mysteries of turbulence remain unsolved to this day, Lewis Richardson (1881–1953) would have been the best human being to help with an explanation. Though Richardson has little public profile, he is actually one of the heroes of modern science: a man who put aside personal glory because of his scruples, persevering with research that would prove highly significant in years to come.

Among specialists Richardson is known primarily for two things. The first is the Richardson number, which enables the turbulence of different weather systems to be measured. The second is a coherent scheme that gives mathematical quantities to pressure, temperature, vorticity and other aspects of weather, bringing them together in a relational, time-based manner that can allow forecasting to take place.
Richardson was a Quaker pacifist who devised his scheme while driving an ambulance in the First World War. It was nearly lost forever under a pile of coal in the trenches. But he found it again, and we’re lucky he did. His plan is the basis of modern weather forecasting. Much of what you see on the television forecast would not be possible without it.

I became interested in Richardson (who appears in my novel under the name Ryman) and the D-Day weather forecast at the same time. And there was a good reason for that. My father-in-law, Julian Hunt, is one of the world’s leading experts in turbulence, and a former director of the Meteorological Office. His great-aunt also happened to be Richardson’s wife, and he spent many holidays with the family while he was a boy. It was Julian who suggested to me that the D-Day weather story had not been fully told; the files about it were only declassified in the 1990s. At the same time I was becoming intrigued by his illustrious relative. Surely, I wondered, being faced with such a significant forecast, the wartime government would have been interested in having input from Richardson? They must have known that if anyone held the secret of weather forecasting it would be him.

I learned that Richardson had left the Met Office when Churchill put it under the control of the Air Ministry (now part of the Ministry of Defence). Involvement with anything military went against his pacifist principles. The decision to leave was sparked by the discovery that his turbulence equations were being used in poison gas experiments at Porton Down. So he left the centres of academic and professional excellence, where he might have become better known, for a quiet life in western Scotland.

There he worked on his meteorology and on many other questions, including the mathematics underlying why countries go to war. (He is one of the founding fathers of peace studies as well as weather forecasting.) There, too, in the fictional speculation of Turbulence, my Richardson figure is visited by a young man sent by the Met Office to prise the secret of weather forecasting from its reluctant originator. The novel is narrated by this young man (his name is Henry Meadows) and, given my own background and interest in Africa, it seemed natural that he should have had a colonial background on that continent. Eventually, as often happens, the two areas of interest (Africa and weather as an aspect of the environment) came into a fruitful relation. In the closing stages of the novel, both I and the narrator became aware of the danger of colonising the environment with a purely human perspective.
Meadows might not learn the secret of weather forecasting but he learns something more valuable: the limits of human perception. That is one of the delights of writing novels, that they can take you, through their indirect routes, to a place you could never have got to via rational thought. I hope the journey is as exciting for readers as it has been for me.

Further reading

Turbulence
By Giles Foden
Faber
Buy now

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