Station Forecast

What it looks like, and what it does

A white louvred box on stilts in heather. An anemometer spinning in no wind. A small display in old dot-matrix type. A rain gauge brimming with something clear. The district below it laid out in lamplight.

Updates at 06:00 and 18:00. Prefers weather metaphors. Never forecasts a day without at least one warm interval.

What is known

Installed in 1983. In 2011 the station's text feed began adding lines of its own: “Tomorrow: scattered grief, forty per cent confession by evening.”

The district's schools, surgeries and farms take it seriously. Doctors schedule consultations around it. Its accuracy over thirteen years is ninety-one per cent. The Met Office has asked to remove it twice. Each time the removal van's route was closed by what the roadworks sign called “a front of resolve.”

What it can do

• Forecasts shared moods across a district a day ahead
• Issues warnings that people act on

Where it stops

• Cannot forecast for any single person
• Has been wrong only on days when someone set out to prove it wrong

An encounter

The forecast read “Heavy hearts by midday, clearing at dusk.” Hallam doubled her appointments. By noon the waiting room held eleven people, and she remarked that every one of them used the same word for what they had come about. By dusk she had no one, and the phone rang once and was put down.

Dr. Beatrix Hallam, general practitioner, Whinmoor automatic weather station, A Thursday forecast

What is established, and what is only said

• established: Surgery records show consultation volumes track the forecast with ninety-one per cent accuracy.
• rumor: That it forecast the day of its own removal and cancelled it.
• interpretation: It may not be predicting how people will feel. It may be telling them in advance so that they can.

Still unresolved

Three times it has forecast “a front of apology approaching from the north.” On each date a letter arrived in the district, unsigned, from a place nobody could find.

Where it has been recorded

• Whinmoor (confirmed) — Recorded by Dr. Beatrix Hallam, general practitioner.

Stories about it

• Forty Per Cent Confession (Entity story, 4 min) — A GP in a moorland district plans her surgery round a weather station that forecasts how the district will feel, and keeps three letters in a drawer that arrived from nowhere at all.

Connected entities

• The Hour of Public Grief — Station Forecast is the only instrument known to have issued a warning ahead of an Hour of Public Grief, in 2017.
• Hourbehind — Both give a district advance notice of itself. Neither has been asked to, and neither has stopped.