Storms From Space
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LearningTranscript
00:01Somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, a storm is coming.
00:09We've evacuated nearly 200,000 people.
00:18By the time it's done, entire communities will be in ruins.
00:24It's just terrible devastation.
00:27Thousands homeless.
00:29We've lost everything.
00:31Lives changed forever.
00:33No one alive has ever seen anything like this.
00:36These storms are becoming stronger and stronger.
00:40It's definitely a battle and nature is upping its game.
00:44But the fight back has begun.
00:47We are very much at the beginning of a revolution.
00:50Now cutting-edge technology is helping us track the most dangerous weather like never before.
00:57We are looking into the future and telling people what's going to happen.
01:01Warning people about lightning, tornadoes and hurricanes so they can get to safety.
01:09The whole point is to save lives.
01:12Our weather is being policed by incredible flying laboratories.
01:18We're carrying four tons of science equipment.
01:21Observed by drones flying higher than ever before.
01:25We are basically an aircraft at that point.
01:27And watched over from space by futuristic weather satellites.
01:32That global view really lets us know what's coming.
01:36Come fly with us above the clouds to discover how revolutionary innovations in weather watching are taking the world by storm.
01:46Well it's an unsettled picture as we head towards the end of the week.
01:55Here in Great Britain obviously we're passionate about the weather.
02:01The waves have breached the sea wall.
02:04It's part of our psyche and that's because it changes so frequently.
02:09The wind is gusting at maybe a hundred miles an hour attitude.
02:13People want an accurate weather forecast.
02:15Sporting 115 mile an hour winds and a bad attitude.
02:19And don't necessarily understand why we can't always be as accurate as we'd like to be.
02:24Thank God it isn't a bank holiday.
02:34It's early in the 2024 hurricane season.
02:37But already a category 5 storm has torn through the Caribbean.
02:42Everything has gone.
02:44I thought that was the end of me.
02:46Powerful hurricane barrel moving across the Caribbean Sea.
02:49Maximum sustained winds about 160 miles per hour.
02:54Hurricane season runs from June to November.
02:57And normally storms this fierce don't occur until much later in the year.
03:03As the season gets going you're not expecting to have a category 5 storm right out of the gate.
03:08Hurricanes are large scale tropical cyclones with sustained winds of over 74 miles per hour.
03:15Hurricanes are hundreds if not thousands of kilometers across.
03:21In America, Houston, Texas takes the hit with severe flooding and wind damage.
03:28Our climate's changing.
03:29Beryl was a classic example of that.
03:31A really powerful storm packing huge winds, dropping vast amounts of rainfall.
03:37It's a devastating start to the 2024 hurricane season.
03:42But it could have been a whole lot worse.
03:48Keeping a watchful eye from 22,000 miles up are weather satellites.
03:56Focused on patrolling Earth's deadliest storms.
04:00It's the great achievement that we're able to launch objects into space that allow us this broad view from a vantage point.
04:10So we're able to constantly monitor the weather.
04:12It is exactly like an eye in the sky and it's something that we rely on increasingly since satellites were first launched back in the 1960s.
04:23Weather satellites have given us the ability to observe and track the hurricane from the time of its birth.
04:29Predict its course and sound a lightsaving warning.
04:34Satellites have been a real game changer for weather forecasters.
04:38Until we had them you just had to rely on a few observations.
04:42But now you can see from space what's coming.
04:45The first weather satellite, TIROS-1, was launched by NASA in 1960.
04:52And gave forecasters and scientists their first glimpse of major weather systems across the planet.
04:59The original satellite images were very, very blurred, shaky images of the Earth in maybe only one or two different wavelengths.
05:08Over the last 60 years they have improved beyond recognition.
05:12Today, a network of satellites around the equator provides forecasters with 80% of the data they use to track major weather events, like hurricanes, and keep people safe.
05:25They've become the key observing system that we rely on for monitoring weather and climate.
05:31On the hurricane front line are America's cutting edge weather observing satellites, called GOES East and GOES West.
05:47Traveling through space at 1.8 miles per second.
05:51The GOESAR satellites are the most advanced weather satellite in the world right now.
05:55They are basically orbiting around the Earth at the same rate that the Earth is rotating.
06:02So they effectively stay over the same spot on the Earth's surface.
06:07The GOES East satellite sees most of North America, but also the Atlantic Ocean, over to Africa.
06:14On average, 14 tropical storms develop over the Atlantic Ocean every year, of which around seven become hurricanes.
06:25And most of them start life 3,000 miles away from America.
06:29The cradle for many of the hurricanes is actually in West Africa, where the tropical waves meet tropical Atlantic warm waters.
06:41You need conditions to be just right for hurricanes to form.
06:46The way that the winds travel around that part of the world, it can generate what's called a wave.
06:52As they come away from Africa, they can then spin up an area of low pressure.
06:57Hurricanes need to be more than five degrees away from the equator to start the spinning.
07:02They also need warm seas, so the sea has to be above about 26 degrees Celsius, otherwise they're not being fed.
07:09As Hurricane Beryl intensified, forecasters around the world monitored its progress using the GOES satellite's high-resolution ABI imager,
07:20which can zoom in and scan deadly storms faster than ever before.
07:25Whenever there's a tropical storm, the Weather Service really calls us up.
07:29Can you point the imager at that storm? I want pictures every 30 seconds.
07:32Using the game-changing GOES satellites, forecasters were able to spot Hurricane Beryl early and predict its speed, intensity and pathway virtually in real time.
07:44The ABI is basically used to track the storm through its entire life cycle to when it becomes, you know, the massive thing that fills the entire field of view.
07:54By the time Beryl blows out, she's left a trail of destruction across 14 countries, $8 billion worth of damage and 73 people dead.
08:06It's one of those contrasting emotions because you look at a hurricane and it's just a thing of beauty, the way it moves around, the way the eye forms, even the cloud formations within the eye, just, you know, almost mesmeric.
08:18But also at the same time, you've got that feeling in the pit of your stomach, wow, this is going to be devastating.
08:22Early detection is everything. Before satellite technology, there was little or no way to predict major storms.
08:31That's one of the big differences since I started forecasting weather, being able to give notice a week ahead of time.
08:39As hurricane season sweeps the Western Atlantic, Europe is battling its own super storms.
08:46We're constantly breaking records for temperatures, but also for rainfall, you know, some of the wettest months we've had have been over the past 10 years.
08:57Worldwide, 1 billion tons of water falls every minute.
09:02In 2023, storm hands swept across Norway, with flash flooding and landslides, leaving thousands stranded by the heaviest rain in 25 years.
09:14Thankfully, Europeans have a new secret weapon looking out for them.
09:27We are right on the cusp of a new generation of satellite imagery.
09:31Weather forecasters are basically chanting at the bit.
09:34And it's just in time to help fight a new wave of extreme weather events, taking the continent by storm.
09:41You do feel that responsibility. Did we get the message out there in time?
09:51With Europe on the cusp of having the most sophisticated weather satellite in the world, UK forecasters can look forward to being better informed than ever.
09:59Because when they do slip up, no one lets them forget it.
10:05It wasn't that long ago that not a lot of it was actually on computer systems.
10:10There's colleagues that I worked with who have had charts printed off and they were drawing their cold fronts on with a blue pencil and their warm fronts on with a red pencil.
10:17Back in 1987, BBC weatherman Michael Fish told us that reports of a major storm headed for the UK were false.
10:27Earlier on today, apparently a woman rang the BBC and said she heard that there was a hurricane on the way.
10:32Well, if you're watching, don't worry, there isn't.
10:36Unfortunately, Michael Fish got it wrong.
10:39Good evening. At least 17 people have been killed and hundreds injured by the worst storms to hit Britain in nearly 300 years.
10:49On the morning of October the 16th, 1987, the British public woke up to devastation after a night of hurricane force winds reaching 115 miles per hour.
11:00London was virtually paralysed.
11:02I can distinctly remember 1987 and the whole Michael Fish incident.
11:08My wife is from Seven Oaks, which became one oak overnight.
11:13At Kew Gardens, woodlands were obliterated.
11:16The great storm left hundreds of thousands without power for weeks and cost 22 people their lives.
11:24Michael Fish became the poster boy for the failure, but he was drawing on information provided by the British Meteorological Office.
11:32The Met, the oldest weather service in the world.
11:36Was the Met office taken by surprise?
11:38Certainly by the severity of the gales, yes.
11:40It's very hard to forecast such intense winds very far ahead.
11:45Forecasting absolutely anything in the future is really tricky, but actually forecasting the weather with so many moving parts, it is tricky.
11:53In 87 there was a really intense area of low pressure that span up almost out of nothing that the computer models struggled to identify and pick out.
12:06Even with satellites these days, there are still quite large gaps.
12:10They still don't really know what's going on.
12:12So we were saying it was going to be windy, we certainly underestimated the strength of it.
12:1587 goes down as a touchstone, if you like, because of the Michael Fish effect and the fact that it wasn't well forecast.
12:23The Met Office, don't forget it, we're now much better at forecasting these smaller scale storms.
12:28Well, it's an unsettled day ahead with some showery rain at times and a risky shower...
12:34Almost 40 years on, the Met, which monitors weather worldwide, processes a staggering 215 billion daily observations.
12:45And the meteorologists are itching to start using data from Europe's groundbreaking new weather satellite, MTG.
12:53So it's about the size of a lorry, weighs about 3.6 tons and it's up there in geostationary orbit.
13:04This game changing European initiative launched from French Guiana in South America in December 2022.
13:13And it's already a world leader.
13:16It's the most advanced, most complex weather satellite that's ever been built.
13:20We will have much better and high resolution data from space with this.
13:25And it enables us to constantly monitor the weather in this part of the globe.
13:30These are just brilliant images of our home planet.
13:34The whole point is to make weather forecasts more reliable and to save lives and property.
13:41We can see the UK, we can see Europe, we can see Africa within the field of view.
13:45We are getting images of the full Earth's disk every 10 minutes, which is a big improvement in terms of what we were getting before.
13:55What you can see here is this, what we call the terminator, the transition from day to night.
13:59As the sun is moving around the other side of the world, it moves across almost in real time.
14:05So up there, the big one with the lid, which is open, sends light to the 16 channel imager that we have, which is an instrument like a very sophisticated camera.
14:21The imaging camera on MTG is specifically calibrated to spot and track extreme weather events wreaking havoc across Europe.
14:31We're seeing more wildfires, we're seeing more floods, we're seeing more of these powerful storms coming.
14:38We'll really be able to pick out individual storms, where they're going and how they're developing.
14:42In 2023, wildfires, caused by extreme heatwave and lightning strikes, destroyed 500,000 hectares in Europe, an area of land equivalent to half of the island of Cyprus.
14:58So MTG is a huge improvement in terms of how well we're able to monitor fires.
15:06Because we've got more channels in the visible part of the spectrum, we can actually get true color.
15:15We can pinpoint very accurately where the fires are starting and then track the smoke in a much better way than we were able to do before.
15:22This was a huge fire on Rhodes Island in Greece that led to evacuation.
15:31In yellow, you have the hotter part of the fire.
15:34That can be important for firefighters to know where the most active parts of the fire is.
15:43MTG's secret weapon in the fight against wildfires is a second camera,
15:48capturing lightning strikes at a thousand frames a second.
15:55The Americans on their go series of satellites have had a lightning mapper for quite a few years now.
16:00And for the first time from space, Europe are going to be in a situation where we're able to see lightning strokes captured from space.
16:07Around the world, there are over three million lightning flashes every day, causing around 44 strikes each second.
16:20Lightning is a real signal for whether a storm is intensifying.
16:24The lightning mapper can indicate where that storm is at its peak, at its most intense.
16:29It can detect what we call continuing current strikes when a lightning strike is happening for a very long time.
16:38And if that's hitting the ground, that is actually a good indication that that might be where a wildfire is starting.
16:45And what you can see with these little flashes as we go from day to night,
16:48it gives you a very, very accurate picture of exactly where the severe storms are at any one time,
16:53whether they're intensifying, which direction they're going in.
16:56So it's a very exciting time.
16:59The MTG satellite creates 50 times more data than its predecessor,
17:04which is fed back to forecasters worldwide, including the British Met Office,
17:10and into weather computer programs called models.
17:14Our main tool for forecasting of the weather days ahead is using these huge numerical weather prediction computer models.
17:21And to run those models, you need the best estimate of what the weather is at this moment, right now.
17:28It's taking in data from satellites, looking down.
17:30It's taking data in from balloons going up through the atmosphere,
17:34from aeroplanes, from our radar network, from our temperature observation network,
17:38both on land and out at sea from buoys.
17:41So all that data goes into the supercomputer to build up the initial conditions,
17:47what the atmosphere is like now.
17:50We break the whole atmosphere around the world into a grid, into boxes.
17:55This atmospheric grid forms the basis of the weather models,
18:01computer simulations that calculate and predict a forecast.
18:05It is a very complex situation.
18:07The Earth's atmosphere and the ocean and the land, they're all interacting together.
18:12We try and model that with computers.
18:14It uses the laws of physics, the laws of meteorology to build a picture
18:19of what the atmosphere will look like in three, six, nine, twelve hours' time,
18:24five days ahead from now.
18:27Crunching all the weather observations is one of the world's most powerful supercomputers.
18:33It's about 14,000 trillion calculations every second.
18:37The equivalent of every man, woman and child on the planet
18:40having around two million calculations per second.
18:44In 1980, the Mets supercomputer could only process four million calculations per second,
18:51which makes their four-day prediction today more accurate than their one-day forecast back then.
18:57So it's constantly making these kind of mathematical and physical calculations
19:02to model what the weather is going to be doing in the future.
19:06Supercomputer or not, the chief meteorologist gets the final say on the official forecast.
19:14Computers do a lot of the hard number crunching, but it requires humans to be able to finesse that
19:22and communicate that as well.
19:24That's where our expert forecasters and meteorologists come in to look at that raw data
19:29and think, well, actually, I've seen this before and that might not be quite right.
19:34It's not always just black and white.
19:38It's been labelled one of the worst storms in decades.
19:42Winds as high as 122 miles per hour.
19:46In 2022, Superstorm Eunice gave MET forecasters an opportunity to prove they were ahead of the game,
19:54so long as they made the right call.
19:56Storm Eunice really sticks in the memory because it was one of those ones where you even start warning people about it
20:03before the formed two or three days ahead.
20:06We went amber with our weather warnings.
20:09Was that the right decision to make?
20:11It was tricky.
20:13As winds of 80 miles per hour destroyed infrastructure across London,
20:17the MET upped their warning to Sevilla, a move with huge financial implications for the capital city.
20:26Eunice claimed its first life here. A woman killed in her car by a falling tree.
20:31You do feel that responsibility. Did we get the message out there in time?
20:38You know, were people able to be prepared?
20:41And then I remember distinctly some images coming in from the dome.
20:45The O2 concert arena shredded like the sails of a ship lost at sea.
20:50And I thought, right, finally, yes, that's kind of backed it up.
20:55We were right to name the storm when there's potentially severe and even life-threatening weather on the way.
21:01We were right to get the message out there.
21:03But as good as our weather satellites may be in 2025, they still don't give us the whole picture.
21:13If you're looking at a satellite picture from above, you get the best view of the top of the atmosphere,
21:18whereas most of us experience weather right at the bottom, on the ground.
21:23We live at the surface of the Earth, and so the weather that affects us personally
21:28is what's happening in the lowest few metres of the atmosphere.
21:34So we will always need to supplement the satellite imagery data with other sources of data.
21:40That's where dedicated weather stations like the Met's observatory at Cambourne in Cornwall come in.
21:46By and large, most people are looking at the forecast on TV,
21:50which shows people looking at satellite pictures or nice fancy weather charts.
21:55What you don't see is the old-fashioned stuff that we do here.
21:58From a geographic point of view, this is quite an important place for the Met office.
22:03And we have the principal role of launching weather balloons right next to the Atlantic Ocean.
22:12First used by French meteorologist, Léon Tesseronc de Boer, as early as 1896,
22:19balloons have been helping us accurately predict the weather ever since.
22:23The radio sond collects its data as it passes through various altitudes.
22:29All this information is relayed back to a ground station through antennas hanging beneath the balloon.
22:35Today, they're still meteorologists' primary method of weather data collection
22:39in the layers of atmosphere closest to Earth.
22:47Well, the balloon shed, it's quite a unique piece of kit.
22:50We can't watch a balloon put us being into wind, so we just turn it around, facing away from the wind.
22:54Once you've got your balloon, you decide how much gas you need to stick in it, and that depends on the weather at the time.
23:01We fill up with helium or hydrogen.
23:05For a balloon assembly, you've got, first of all, the balloon itself.
23:12You then attach a parachute.
23:15What goes up must come down.
23:17Laws of physics and gravity.
23:19And then finally, you attach the radio sond.
23:22This is the scientific piece of kit, the whole reason why we launch balloons full of hydrogen and helium,
23:27to take our upper air observations.
23:29Pressure, temperature and humidity.
23:32Meteorologists call it a sounding. It's like sounding back information.
23:36The measurements taken by this highly sensitive metal strip
23:38are transmitted back to the weather station in real time,
23:43and on to MET head office.
23:45Helping to forecast anything from rain, thunderstorms or snow.
23:51It's got a special polystyrene on it, and it's all biodegradable to protect the oceans.
23:57Once released, the latex balloon will travel to the edge of space,
24:01as high as 25 miles above sea level,
24:04collecting data all the way, and expanding as it rises.
24:09The balloon will be about 20 times bigger.
24:12Bigger than this balloon shed by the time it bursts.
24:15Which gives you an idea of how different the pressure is compared to what we experience here at roughly sea level.
24:24When the weights are just leaving the ground,
24:27it's when we turn the gas off and we know we've got the correct amount of gas required for the launch of the day.
24:33A great day for launching a balloon.
24:34They are giving us the most detailed vertical picture, and that's never going to be able to be captured by satellites.
24:48It's non-stop now that this travels through.
24:52Globally, around 1,800 weather balloons are released each day at the fixed times of midday and midnight GMT.
25:01But a new piece of tech is hot on their heels.
25:04It's always a good day for flying.
25:07A revolution in the skies that could change the way we gather weather observations for good.
25:14At midday GMT, our balloon launched from Camborne and has been climbing at a rate of 11 miles per hour through the layer of atmosphere closest to the ground, the troposphere.
25:26As you go up through the atmosphere, most clouds that are generating rainfall are within a couple of kilometers of people on the ground.
25:35And that three-dimensional view gives you a much better perspective right the way through the atmosphere.
25:39At a height of between 4 to 12 miles high, depending where you are on the planet, the troposphere becomes the stratosphere, which extends up to 31 miles.
25:52Aircraft fly in this layer of the atmosphere as there is less weather disturbance.
25:56As soon as we launch the balloon, our radiosonde is now transmitting data back to us.
26:03And we get readings every two seconds from the radiosonde, so we get quite a lot of data during a two-hour ascent.
26:09And the more data we have, the more accurate the forecasts become.
26:13As the balloon reaches the end of its ascent, temperatures have dropped to minus 90 degrees Celsius.
26:19It's now reached an altitude of about height as your airliner's go, so it's pretty good, isn't it, for a bit of plastic, isn't it?
26:29Once the balloon does burst, the sun is just parachuted back to Earth again.
26:34In my opinion, balloon data is crucial.
26:37I imagine in the fullness of time, something will come along to replace it, but there's nothing at the moment.
26:42Without balloon observations, forecasters would struggle to predict those weather events hidden from the satellites by clouds that still pack a punch.
26:53Weather impacts everyone directly or indirectly every day, and it's about getting the message across.
26:59It's often simply, right, there's a shower here, the winds are at this speed, that shower is going to be here in half an hour's time.
27:06And that's really, really useful for things like thunderstorms and showers that develop in the summer, dropping a lot of rain in the short space of time.
27:17An RAF helicopter hovers precariously low above a building cut off by a raging torrent.
27:24The torrential rain that greeted the rescuers began this afternoon.
27:28A sharp reminder of the need for this sort of forecasting occurred in August 2004, when the small Cornish village of Bozcastle was hit by flash floods.
27:40The emergency teams could hardly believe what they were seeing.
27:43Because Cornwall's on a peninsula, you often get sea breezes both from the north and the south, and they converge.
27:50And if that's coupled with the local terrain, then you can get storms, and they stay basically in the same spot for hours on end.
27:59The average thundercloud weighs 500 tons, and in just two hours, a month's worth of rain fell on the hills above Bozcastle, before cascading through the village.
28:10It was just completely incredible.
28:15And I think the Met Office really came into its own.
28:19Even though you couldn't stop the deluge, but the Met Office played an important part in forecasting now.
28:25Probably made up a bit for what happened in the 80s with Michael Fish, I guess.
28:33Meteorologists are constantly searching for new sources of information.
28:37And in Europe, a Swiss company have a plan to revolutionize the speed and frequency of data collection in the lower atmosphere.
28:47Drones will be the future for weather forecasting.
28:52Based in St. Gallen, near Zurich, MeteorMatics started life as a weather forecasting service.
28:58Everyone knows that. Local thunderstorms in summer, they've never been in any forecast, and suddenly you're surprised.
29:06The same goes for fog.
29:09And this can be crucial for airports.
29:13Alongside crosswinds, fog is one of the leading causes of disruption to air travel, affecting thousands of flights around the world each year, and proving extremely hard to forecast.
29:23It's a huge challenge.
29:26Our goal was to improve forecasting, improve data that goes into weather models, and we do that with our Meteor Drones.
29:36Meet the Meteor Drone.
29:37It might look similar to a consumer drone, but this one carries an impressive range of weather-detecting kit, packed into this single lightweight sensor.
29:55It's always a good day for flying. Doesn't matter how the weather is.
30:08Drones this size are normally only allowed to fly within line of sight, but MeteorMatics have set out to raise the bar in a big way.
30:18Drones typically fly to 120 meters, so this is not very high.
30:22What we do is we frequently and reliably fly to six kilometers.
30:37120 meters is the height of the London Eye.
30:41MeteorMatics has built drones that can safely fly 50 times higher.
30:45Worldwide, the only ones who can do that, who can fly to that altitude.
30:53So that's currently the limit, because the air at the altitude gets thinner.
30:59So there's a physical limit to the drone at the moment.
31:04You're entering controlled airspace where regular airplanes are flying, and this is really a challenge.
31:10We are basically an aircraft at that point. It's cutting edge. It's really something new that you haven't been able to do before.
31:20It can withstand really high wind speeds. It can withstand weather conditions that are beyond compare.
31:26It has a propeller heating system, so whenever we encounter an icing layer, we can just pull through it.
31:31Where no other drone could do that, it will crash. It makes the drone unique, definitely.
31:38As airspace is generally quieter at night, flights are often undertaken during the hours of darkness.
31:47The benefit of flying at night is you collect the weather data during the night, you feed it into a model, and then you do the forecast for the day.
31:54And with these meteor drones, we can measure humidity, temperature, wind speed and wind direction, and pressure.
32:03We can get reliable data on fog, thunderstorms, hail.
32:09So the weather data that we collect is compatible with any kind of model.
32:14So, for example, the UK Met Office could easily feed it into their weather model.
32:18The target is to provide countries with networks of drones housed in autonomous charging pods that are overseen remotely.
32:28It's early days, but the ambition is sky high for meteor drones to play a vital role in predicting extreme weather like hurricanes.
32:38The drones will measure basically the conditions before actually the storms are forming,
32:44so that you can predict that this storm, this hurricane is coming.
32:49It's a huge challenge, but the benefit is really huge, so we take on the challenge and we like the challenge.
32:57Accurate and frequent atmospheric readings are crucial to predict a storm,
33:03and giving us enough time to prepare for it.
33:05But sometimes planet Earth throws forecasters such a curve ball, there's no other option than to fly directly into one.
33:19Look at the lightning. This is as close as we dare go to this huge plume.
33:24In 2010, a volcano in Iceland spewed 250 million cubic meters of ash, five miles into the atmosphere.
33:35We're over Ground Zero for the worst travel disruption the world has known since September the 11th.
33:41Ejected into the jet stream, the plume quickly began to travel across northern Europe.
33:46Millions of travellers had their plans disrupted as 20 countries were forced to close their airspace.
33:54Essentially, you had an erupting volcano and you had a glacier on top,
33:58and what was generated as a result of that was a significant amount of airborne ash that posed a risk to aviation.
34:06Particles within the plume had the potential to cause catastrophic failure to jet engines.
34:12The molten rock, when it hits the air, it turns to glass.
34:19And then it coats the turbine blades and it clogs holes that are used for cooling the engine.
34:27It soon became apparent that the eruption was going to go on for some time.
34:31A few days turned into a few weeks, and that volcano carried erupting for months.
34:35But one specially adapted weather plane got the thumbs up to take to the skies.
34:43The FAM airborne laboratory.
34:46It's an aircraft that has been specially converted to turn it into a kind of flying science laboratory.
34:53It's certainly one of a kind in the UK, and it's used for doing science experiments that involve the atmosphere.
34:58Since 2004, this former British Aerospace 146 passenger jet has been carrying up to four tons of scientific instruments and crew into extreme weather.
35:12We've measured the reflectivity of snow in Alaska.
35:16We've measured desert temperatures and storms over the Sahara.
35:21We've measured methane emissions over bogs in northern Sweden.
35:26The World Health Organization estimates that between four and seven million people a year die from air pollution.
35:35So what our aircraft does very well is work throughout the troposphere, which is the lowest portion of the Earth's atmosphere.
35:43We're able to fly safely down to 50 feet over the sea, and then the aircraft can fly up as high as 35,000 feet.
35:49In 2010, the volcanic plume rendered commercial flight too dangerous, so FAM were tasked with finding a way of mapping the ash in the atmosphere over the UK.
36:01It's quite a difficult challenge because ash and cloud, water cloud, looks quite similar, and we had to carefully think about the safety of the aircraft.
36:10The decision was taken to gain altitude, mapping the plume from above to protect the aircraft's engines.
36:17The main instrument that we carried was an aerosol lidar, which uses lasers and enables you to essentially fly along and look down at what's underneath you.
36:27And so we were subsequently then able to detect and use this lidar to kind of map the areas beneath the aircraft and determine where the ash was in the atmosphere to inform operational decisions on the ground.
36:38FAM remained on duty for the next six weeks, mapping the ash cloud above the UK until it was deemed safe for commercial aircraft to return to the skies.
36:50We were cited as one of the ten reasons why it was safe to reopen UK airspace, the fact that we'd undertaken flights and confirmed the Met Office predictions that there was no ash remaining in UK airspace.
37:01Fifteen years on, the FAM aircraft is as busy as ever.
37:08We've done probably about two million miles of science flights, visited 30, 40 countries.
37:13The research that we've undertaken has been used to underpin around 500 scientific publications.
37:19Planes, high-altitude drones and balloons are accelerating our ability to predict the weather better than ever before.
37:26But it doesn't stop there.
37:29Across the globe, efforts are being made to not only accurately forecast the weather, meteorologists are now trying to control it.
37:39We can make it rain, but if we make it rain in one place, there'll be another place that will be without rain.
37:45So it's a risky thing to try and start controlling nature.
37:49Watched over by satellites, drones and weather planes, we're better at forecasting than ever.
38:00But human intervention has always had a vital role to play.
38:04What I'm sure has to be the most important weather forecast ever is the D-Day landing in June 1944.
38:19It was at dawn, 4.15 on the morning of June the 5th, that General Eisenhower took the decision that the invasion should go ahead.
38:28His Met advisor, Group Captain Stagg, said there was a tiny break in the weather.
38:34This is the D-Day chart, allowed us to avoid a very bad weather on the 5th of June and find the weather window that enabled us to invade on the 6th and saved thousands of lives.
38:43Bad weather came after the fighting on the beaches was over. The heavy storm left a trail of damaged ships.
38:49That was a moment in time where the weather forecast made a difference to the future of the planet.
38:57Human opinion continues to play a vital role in forecasting, but is also driving our appetite and ambition to control the weather.
39:06In 2019, major cities in Malaysia and Singapore experienced dangerous air pollution from uncontrolled wildfires in neighbouring Indonesia.
39:20Their authorities couldn't stop the haze, but they could do something else.
39:24The government is ready to do cloud seeding whenever it is possible.
39:32Cloud seeding is just an artificial way of doing what happens in nature.
39:39We can make clouds.
39:41Cloud seeding works by transporting vast quantities of a chemical called silver iodide into the sky,
39:48and then spraying it into the atmosphere in tiny particles.
39:53These then act as a trigger for clouds to form.
39:57If we get a whole bunch of these cloud droplets, they start to coagulate together, so they bounce into each other and stick.
40:04And as they stick, they just get bigger and bigger and bigger. Then, hey, presto, we have rain.
40:09You obviously need water to be present. You can't make clouds out of dry air.
40:13So you're just providing the catalyst, if you like, that's going to produce the clouds.
40:19If we can make clouds, then what follows is rain, which the Malaysian government used to refresh the air.
40:26When it rains, that is quite an effective way of washing the atmosphere. It takes the pollution out.
40:34The idea emerged in the late 1940s, but was first used in anger during the American war in Vietnam.
40:41There's a well-documented operation called Operation Popeye, where the Americans tried to extend the monsoon,
40:51which was then going to flood the supply lines to the Viet Cong.
40:55The general consensus in the military is that we can't make much progress until we deny the Viet Cong supplies.
41:02So, obviously, that would impact their ability to fight.
41:07Whether or not it worked is a topic of some controversy.
41:11One of the main outcomes of it was the United Nations then banned cloud seeding for the use in warfare, which is a very good thing.
41:19But it wasn't made illegal altogether, and today, around 50 countries spend millions of dollars every year on cloud seeding programmes.
41:29What happened ahead of the Beijing Olympics is quite well known.
41:37Ahead of the opening ceremony, they had a team of nearly 40,000 people firing rockets and shells up into the atmosphere to get rid of the rain.
41:46In this instance, cloud seeding was used to encourage natural rainfall to happen before the Olympic events started each day.
41:55They simply rang out the atmosphere to ensure that they had a nice dry opening ceremony.
42:05In North America and Canada, cloud seeding is being heralded as a solution to major crop fails, following destructive hailstorms.
42:14Some of the Midwest storms in the US have been described as being billion-dollar storms,
42:20because if there's a big hailstorm, it will flatten all the wheat, and they can't harvest it, so they've lost their crop.
42:27By making it rain before the clouds turn to hail, the crops can be protected, saving billions of dollars.
42:35It has a direct impact on the global wheat price.
42:41Cloud seeding is regulated, but remains a controversial topic.
42:45Recent flooding in the UAE sparked conspiracy theories about their cloud seeding programme.
42:52There's potential for geopolitics to come in if you're making it rain in your country for your agriculture,
43:00but at the detriment of your neighbours.
43:03And many, many wars have been fought over water.
43:07If you get too much rainfall, you get flooding, and then you get erosion.
43:10There's always consequences.
43:13It's a risky thing to try and start controlling nature.
43:21I think the dawn of being able to look at the planet from space has really helped,
43:26because you can see how everything is connected globally.
43:30We really need to think about everything we do and the consequences it has for the global population.
43:36Next time, hurricanes.
43:46Earth's most destructive storms.
43:51There is a storm surge to come, and then extensive flooding.
43:56While those on the ground evacuate.
43:58It's just horrific.
43:59Up above, hurricane hunters risk their lives.
44:05Flying into these monster storms is something that I never thought I would be doing.
44:12Do not go outside, or you will die.
44:13Or you will die.
44:17And Storms from Space is back next Friday at 8.
44:20But what secret messages do royal makeup designs signify?
44:24The secrets of the traditions will be revealed tomorrow at 8.
44:27And going crazy for the Milanese, Michael Portillo's discoverer,
44:31the genius of da Vinci, as his travel diaries in Milan continue brand new next.
44:34And continue brand new next.