The film, The Perfect Storm, , now showing at a cinema near you, promises to be a ripping yarn about man's eternal struggle with the sea.
As you may gather from this non-committing introduction, I have not seen the film yet, and so cannot comment on its meteorological credentials.
I have, however, read Sebastian Junger's book on which the film is based, and can heartily recommend it as a cornucopia of serendipitous weather information.
Junger gives a good account, for example, of the time the US Weather Service found itself in court.
Meteorologists, of course, are frequently summoned to appear before the bench.
Usually, however, their presence is required for their scientific expertise - to confirm or refute, for example, the meteorological contentions of litigating parties - and not for a judicial assessment of their own civil or criminal liability.
But some years ago in the US the meteorologists themselves were in the dock.
It began with a storm off the east coast in 1980, and Junger describes the sequence of events:
"It was late November and the Weather Service predicted several days of moderate winds, but they were catastrophically wrong. One of the worst storms on record had just drawn a deep breath off the Carolinas. It screamed northward all night and slammed into Georges Bank around dawn, dredging up seventy-foot waves in the weird shallows of the continental shelf. To make matters worse, a crucial offshore data buoy had been malfunctioning for the past 2 1/2 months, and the Weather Service had no idea what was going on out there."
Many boats and lives were lost that night, and in due course civil action was taken by relatives of those who perished in that storm.
Junger's narrative continues: "Four years later US District Judge Joseph Tauro in Boston ruled that the National Weather Service was negligent in their failure to repair the broken buoy. Had it been working, he wrote, the Weather Service might have predicted the storm; and furthermore, they failed to warn fishermen that they were making forecasts with incomplete information.
"This was the first time that the government had ever been held responsible for a bad forecast, and it sent shudders of dread through the federal government. Every plane crash, every car accident could now conceivably be linked to weather forecasting. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration appealed the decision, and it was quickly overturned by a higher court."
Needless to say, not just the American Weather Service, but all national meteorological services around the world, breathed a collective sigh of great relief.