Our man for all seasons

Damian Rodgers, our man with the weather

MARTYN MEETS... weatherman Damian Rodgers
EVERY day, Damian Rodgers rings the Chronicle and gives one of my colleagues a comprehensive set of weather statistics.

The data is complied by Oldham’s weatherman at his home in Moorside and records the maximum and minimum temperatures, maximum windspeed, barometer readings and rainfall.

What use any of this information is to anyone I have yet to work out, but it’s a labour of love for Damian, who has been faithfully recording this data in Oldham for more than 33 years.

Well that’s almost true.

For nine years, when he studied geomorphology (a combination of geography and geology) at Coventry and later worked around the country, his father Jack took the readings and, like father like son, faithfully recorded the data in Damian’s folders. The data goes back to the 1978-79 Winter of Discontent when, as a 10 year old, he bought his first thermometer and began taking notes.

“I still did all the things my mates did, like football and stuff, I just didn’t tell them about my weather stuff,” he told me.

He can’t explain how his love of all things weather came to pass. The wind of change, as it were, wafted over him in 1978. Older readers will recall it was a particularly cold winter, exacerbated by the binmen’s strike and industrial action by road gritters.

“I bought a thermometer at the local ironmonger’s and just started writing down the temperatures,” he recalled with a simplicity that forbade any challenge from me. And why wouldn’t you? Surely any self respecting 10 year old was doing the same thing, or trainspotting, or something...?

As an adult Damian, who works for PC World-Currys’s logistics team, has found many like-minded people and is an influential member of the shadowy Climatological Observer Group and TORRO, a tornado observation group. Apparently we get lots of tornadoes in the UK, just not often very big ones.

And it’s always yesterday’s weather: Damian is a statistician, not a forecaster.

“That ruins reputations, they can go down fast and you needs lots of super-duper equipment and stuff. Anyway, no-one can really tell you what going to happen, not really. You can’t control nature. They’re just forecasts of what should happen given certain conditions.”

So what does he do with all this information?

“Well sometimes the Meteorological Office (which does do forecasting) will ask the Climatological Observer Group for statistics and data to use at inter-government conferences on global warming. We have a wealth of historical data that is impossible to dispute.”

Though Damian may be unique here in Oldham, his diligent recording every day of the minutiae of Oldham’s weather is actually replicated by lots of people around the country — and they are of one mind; that the evidence of global warming is irrefutable. Unless something is done about carbon emissions, come the end of the century, the consequences for the planet will be massive and catastrophic...

Perhaps I have strayed off the subject a little.

From that first thermometer Damian progressed to a more sophisticated one that recorded maximum and minimum temperatures.

Then he progressed to a rainfall collector — a copper vessel, which is important as steel can rust and influence water catchment.

Damian still has this vessel — which was the result of a lot of saving for a small lad – but has progressed to a computer-based system that collects info from a device fixed to the side of his house. “The kind of thing you will see on a motorway or an A road, just the same,” he explains.

As a labour of love, his data collection knows no ends. He once took his wife on holiday to India: “She thought we were going as tourists for a sunny time... but I knew it was the monsoon season in Mumbai,” he offered. He experienced a metre of rainfall in 24 hours: yes, weather geek heaven. in case you’re wondering this ultra-wet September we’ve just had saw less than a fifth of that amount over the whole month. And June and July were wetter.

You perhaps won’t be surprised to read that Damian is no longer married. When he built a weather station in the garden, the former Mrs Rodgers was convinced it was a rabbit hutch. Though he insists his preoccupation with weather had nothing to do with his singular situation.

“Not even when I spent £1,000 buying the computer and other stuff. There was a raised eyebrow, I suppose...”

It’s actually unfair to say Damian is married to his hobby — he spends only four to five hours a week collecting data and helping with the Observer Group bulletin, to which he supplies articles and information. Hardly any time at all.

He works at a job that takes him all over the country but he never fails to make the readings.

And the man from Moorside never fails to ring the Chron.


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