Weather reckoning: Britain’s famous forecasting failure

• “Are you going to resign?” read the words, scrawled on a scrap of paper and pushed through the letter box of a quiet London house.

Outside, reporters were demanding answers from one of Britain’s best-known weather forecasters, Michael Fish, who had just reassured viewers that a hurricane wasn’t going to hit Britain. Inside, his 11-year-old daughter, Nicola, bent down to collect the note.

“It was really shocking,” she said recently, sitting beside her father in the same home where the message landed 38 years ago.

It was Oct. 16, 1987. By dawn, southern Britain’s landscape was unrecognisable. The country had been hit overnight by its fiercest storm in more than 300 years. Winds topping 100 mph tore through homes and countryside, felling 15 million trees, downing power lines, and killing