David Houghton

madforsailing.com talks to Team GBR's top meteorologist

mfs - What does a meteorologist do within Team GB?

DH - I’m basically a meteorologist but also a coach. The sailors use the wind and I help them understand it. People call me a forecaster but the local forecasters should be able to do most of the forecasting job. However, if they’re not sailors then they won't really understand what the sailors need to know, especially in terms of whether the wind will shift to the right or left, will it increase or decrease. In some classes you have very significant limits on the wind speed before you have to change your rig, and so on.
mfs - So, do you use the information from the local forecaster and interpret it for Team GB?

DH - I use the basic information that is available, from whatever source and decide what is relevant and what is not. But my job starts before that, before the Olympics and throughout the Games, where I will train the team to understand the data. I really have to meet the team early in the Olympic cycle and establish a rapport with each team member. My job is 50% teacher or coach.

A forecast, well people will say that it’s never right, or some people may have real confidence in their forecasts and say that it’s always right, but the wind that’s forecast is not the only consideration. The major consideration here, in a place like Sydney Harbour is how does the wind interact with the land-sea interface. There are certain features about the land and the sea, and the behaviour of the wind when it blows from land-to-sea, or sea-to-land, is consistent when the wind is in a particular direction in relation to the coast. So coastal meteorology is a fact, and something that the sailors can learn. These are the things that you can use to your advantage because you have confidence in them. For example, there is always a bend when the wind is blowing offshore and if you appreciate that then you sail better.

mfs - So day to day, how do you ensure that the sailors are fully briefed.

DH - Every morning I pick up information from everywhere possible. The Australians have laid on the best forecasting service and the best weather data service that has ever been available in an Olympics. It’s absolutely fantastic, so I’m not short of information or data. I’ve also got historical information from the Australian Weather Bureau, which is infinitely valuable for the team.

mfs - Is this data given straight to the team?

DH - My job is to digest all this information before it reaches the team, because you’ve got to sort out what information is important. Every day I’m up at 6 am and go down to the weather operations centre at Woollahra Sailing Club and pick up from the Internet everything that’s available from the Weather Bureau. I also make observations on the harbour - have a look and see what’s happening. If necessary, like this morning, I’ll put up a weather balloon to find out what the wind is doing all the way up to 3,000 feet, which is the level of wind which drives the sea breeze.

mfs - How long have you been doing this here in Sydney? How long have the preparations been?

DH - We started immediately after the last Olympics were over. I’ve been here three times now before this year and I’ve been sussing out what typically happens here in Sydney, because unless you come here, you can’t really appreciate what the Harbour is like and what the high ground is doing and so on.

mfs - Have you ever got it horribly wrong?

DH - No, but there is always a sense, when you look back on a day that you think, well I could have done better, but sometimes you look back on a day and think, I really got that right today. Occasionally, there are unknown factors that have influenced the wind on a particular day and you know that you couldn’t have done better even if I had everything available. For example, last Friday; we got a thick haze, which descended, over Sydney. That was very interesting because a thick haze means that there is no mixing of the air in the air aloft, which means that the sea breeze has great difficulty in getting in underneath. What happened there was that the sea breeze just broke up because it couldn’t contend with what we call an inversion. It was quite unusual to have that in Sydney and it did take us unawares.

mfs - How many Olympic Games have you been to and how is Sydney different to previous Games?

DH - My first Olympics were in 1968 in Acapulco at the Mexico Olympics. Acapulco had a reputation for being totally unknown and unpredictable and they asked me if I’d go out there and help them predict it! For some reason or another, they still want me to this day.

It doesn’t matter where you go in the world; the principles that determine the surface wind and sea breeze are the same everywhere. But every sailing venue has its own peculiar characteristics. It has its own shape, its own relationship between the water and the land and so on, and you’ve got to experience that first hand to really get to grips with it. We got to grips with it very well in Savannah, but the support services were nothing like those provided by the Australians. The Australian support services are brilliant. They’ve got ten automatic weather reporting stations which are live on the Internet. As preparation for coming to Sydney, I did a forecast every day in August for the harbour using this.

mfs - How did you get into this job? Are you a sailor first or a meteorologist?

DH - Well, I’m a sailor and a meteorologist. I have a degree in meteorology and a career of 36 years in the Met Office and three years in the Navy doing meteorology. In the late 50’s and 60’s, I ran a course called 'Weather and Sailing' for the Royal Meteorology Society every year for ten years, and as a result I learnt as much as the people I was teaching, because we were actively putting the two together in a field study situation. So all of a sudden people started regarding me as an expert! I certainly harboured no ambition to work with Olympic teams. We’ve sailed for many years, and still have a Wayfarer in the family. I’ve done a fair bit of big boat sailing. I did the Fastnet in 1981, but I did start out in a dinghy.

mfs - Thanks David.