It wasn't in my early years that I developed an interest in the weather as most of them were spent in Africa, Northern Rhodesia, Zambia as it's now known, where weather consisted of sunshine 90% of the time and a lot of rain in the rainy season usually short heavy showers followed by more sunshine.

It was only when I came to the UK in 1974 that weather took on a different meaning, so much so that the first UK winter and quite a few after that had me scouring the papers for jobs back in warmer climates.

Weather obsessions

It didn't take long to realise why the British were so obsessed with the weather, I seemed to spend most of my time complaining about it.

The Command centre

A real interest in the weather started in 1999 when a friend of mine asked if I would like to join BBC Radio Cleveland’s Weather Watcher team (before the station was renamed BBC Tees) as they were looking for people to do a early morning report. This involved being rung up at 7am one morning a week and being asked live on air what the weather was doing outside my window at that time.

The demise of Weather Watchers and a love of gadgets and anything to do with computers led to my first purchase of an electronic weather station complete with rain gauge, anemometer min and max thermometer which connected to the computer allowed me to store daily weather data.

Setting up station

The obvious progression from this was to set up a website to display the data, after many incarnations we end up with what I have now for all the world to see.