"TWAS brillig and the slithy toves" said Alice, looking Through the Looking Glass, "did gyre and gimble in the wabe." And further on, after the dreaded Jabberwock has been eliminated, she has the anonymous narrator exclaim "A frabjous Day! Callooh Callay!" And thus it is today for meteorologists.
Today, March 23rd, is the annually appointed World Meteorological Day, a global exercise in public relations coordinated by the World Meteorological Organisation from its headquarters in Geneva. A theme is chosen each year, providing for meteorologists throughout the world a particular aspect of their activities that they may care to highlight.
"Satellites in Meteorology", for example, was one of these some years ago, as were "Meteorology and the Media" and "Meteorology in Aviation". Last year it was "Meteorology as a Public Service", and in 1996, presumably because it happens to be Olympic year, the chosen theme is "Meteorology and Sport".
Take soccer, for example. When it comes to football, it is not unknown for the large and peaceful crowds observing the activities to include a meteorologist or two. Indeed some years ago, a weatherman who admitted such a weakness assuaged his guilt by producing a study on the effect of weather on attendances at Scottish football matches. Perhaps he justified his frivolous inclination as being in line with the advice of Horace: Omne tulit qui miscuit utile dulci.
("He who has mixed what is useful with that which gives him pleasure has succeeded in scoring all the goals").
In order to isolate the effects of weather, our sporty weatherman had to eliminate from the equation all the other variables that might have a bearing on attendances at football games like the league position of the teams, the recent performance of the home club, the reputation of the opposition, the timing of the match the context of the football season, and so on.
When all this was done, he found that the size of the crowd was unrelated to the "local temperature, or to the amount of sunshine on the day in question but there was a distinct relationship with rainfall.
He found an average decrease of 200 people in attendance for every additional "millimetre of rain on the day the match took place. In other words, if the rainfall that day was 10 mm above the norm, the attendance could be expected to be about 2,000 people below average all other things being equal. But then, I suppose, in soccer things are never equal, are they?