http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-32483678

Kind regards, Paul.

Yes, Paul - they did a programme on his life & work some time ago. Surprised it hasn't been repeated (would make a nice change from election forecasts).

We love our shipping forecast, Paul. It's something to do with our being an island race, I suppose. Here's one of my favourite poems. You have to be British - or Irish - maybe, to understand the emotional  impact of the names of the sea areas - although I think Beowulf would have understood:

The Shipping Forecast by Seamus Heaney

Dogger, Rockall, Malin, Irish Sea:
Green, swift upsurges, North Atlantic flux
Conjured by that strong gale-warning voice,
Collapse into a sibilant penumbra.
Midnight and closedown. Sirens of the tundra,
Of eel-road, seal-road, keel-road, whale-road, raise
Their wind-compounded keen behind the baize
And drive the trawlers to the lee of Wicklow.
L’Etoile, Le Guillemot, La Belle Hélène
Nursed their bright names this morning in the bay
That toiled like mortar. It was marvellous
And actual, I said out loud, ‘A haven,’
The word deepening, clearing, like the sky
Elsewhere on Minches, Cromarty, The Faroes.



There was panic last year (30/5/2014):


A tidal wave of discontent engulfed our Isle this morning. BBC Radio 4 failed to broadcast its 5.20am daily shipping forecast. Complaints flooded in over social media from a bewildered nation, with one woman fearing that its absence meant a “nuclear armageddon” was on the way.


Fortunately, she had no cause to worry – a technical error was responsible for the glitch. Listeners, who had tuned into Radio 4 for the hypnotic tones of the shipping forecast, were instead hearing the sound waves of the BBC World Service.


An apology has been issued by the BBC and the shipping forecast did air (at the later time of 6.40am), but the debacle highlighted just how anchored the Radio 4 show is in British culture.



http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/10864894/The-shipping-forecast-part-of-Britains-cultural-tapestry.html


PS Carol Ann Duffy finishes her poem ‘Prayers’ with the lines:

"Darkness outside. Inside, the radio’s prayer –

Rockall. Malin. Dogger. Finisterre."

Weather Forecast

The day will get off to a cloudy start.
It will be quite chilly
But as the day progresses
The sun will come out
And the afternoon will be dry and warm.

In the evening the moon will shine
And be quite bright.
There will be, it has to be said,
A brisk wind
But it will die out by midnight.
Nothing further will happen.

This is the last forecast.

Harold Pinter March 2003



His previously published poem however was much shorter, and much better ...

Democracy

There's no escape.
The big pricks are out.
They'll f**k everything in sight.
Watch your back.

Harold Pinter Februrary 2003




And just in case these were too subtle ...

God Bless America

Here they go again,
The Yanks in their armoured parade
Chanting their ballads of joy
As they gallop across the big world
Praising America's God.

The gutters are clogged with the dead
The ones who couldn't join in
The others refusing to sing
The ones who are losing their voice
The ones who've forgotten the tune.

The riders have whips which cut.
Your head rolls onto the sand
Your head is a pool in the dirt
Your head is a stain in the dust
Your eyes have gone out and your nose
Sniffs only the pong of the dead
And all the dead air is alive
With the smell of America's God.

Harold Pinter January 2003

You lot can take the p*ss all you like.

I love the Shipping Forecast, so there.



PS Finisterre is now Fitzroy - this sea area was renamed in his honour. I'm glad for poor old Fitzroy, but I did like "Finisterre" - dead poetic and all, meaning "the end of the earth".

I miss Finisterre too - Fitzroy is all very well but having a chunk of sea called "royal bastard" is much less romantic than "world's end" (here be monsters etc).

Finisterre was dropped as it is also used by the Spanish in their own shipping forecast, but for them is another place entirely.

If you want to lose 15 minutes of your life that you will never get back again here is a click'n'play page that includes Cecilia McDowall's "Shipping Forecast", a choral work in three movements from 2012. She was moved to compose it, she said, when it struck her how mysterious it all was (she didn't know what was meant by "good" or what a North Utsire was when it was at home). She also misses Finisterre - who she probably thought was a top-hat-and-tailed dancer.

I was aware that North Utsire and South Utsire were newcomers to the BBC shipping forecast in the 1980s. And I had thought that these were existing areas to the north of Viking. What I hadn't appreciated (until now) was that they were actually ceded from Viking. I have obviously been confusing them with East Tampen and West Tampen all this while. It's a good job that no fisherman or oil workers etc were dependent on my marine weather reports over the last 30 years!

P.S. Why are there 2 ways of spelling Utsira?

Utsira is the right spelling. "Utsire" is a result of editorial sloppiness in the Met Office which has somehow "stuck".

The word itself is not at all clear in meaning, The Store Norske Leksikon (Big Norwegian Encyclopedia) says this:

Navnet. Førsteleddet Ut- viser til at øya ligger langt til havs. Sira er ikke sikkert forklart; det kan ha samme rot som sjå, med henblikk på at øya er synlig langt til havs, men det kan også settes i samband med sær, sjø, i så fall opprinnelig benyttet om den åpne havstrekningen mellom Utsira og Karmøy. Det er også tolket som en avledning av verbet siga, i så fall om strømningsforhold.

The name: The prefix Ut- indicates that the island lies offshore (not inshore). Sira is not clearly understood. It could be from the same root as "sjå" (to see) with reference to the fact that the island is visible (from the mainland), but it could also be related in a nautical sense to "sær" (special, unique) which might have applied to the open strait between Utsira and Karmøy. There is also an interpretation linking the word to the verb "siga" (gently flow), in which case the reference is to the currents in the area.

Thanks for that translation nordmann. The spelling 'Utsire' could, perhaps, be seen as being the first stage in a creeping Anglicisation of the name. No doubt in a few hundred years the shipping report might then be referring to 'North Outshire' and 'South Outshire' or even 'North Outshower' and 'South Outshower'.

The more I look into this subject (of meteorological sea areas) the more I find that my ignorance of it seems to be 'deepening'. Take Finisterre for example. I had imagined that it related to an area off Brittany (i.e. French Finistere) and that this was being confused with the Spanish Finisterra off Galicia - hence the name change. Now, however, I find that the area today known as Fitzroy (formerly Finisterre) is indeed off Galicia. So heaven knows where the other 'Spanish Finisterre' is.

Same area - but only a small part of it, AIUI.

Gilgamesh of Uruk wrote:

Same area - but only a small part of it, AIUI.

The Spanish Finisterre sea area is indeed much smaller than the British equivalent. Whereas the British shipping forecast has 2 seas areas (Fitzroy and Biscay) covering the seas west of France and north of Spain, the Spanish have no fewer than 6 areas covering the same. This is no doubt an indication of just how much busier and more important those fishing grounds are for Spain. On the other hand, the British named areas of Shannon, Fastnet and Sole are dealt by the Spanish with just one large area named Gran Sol. This takes its name from the Great Sole Bank which lies about 100 nautical miles south-west of the Scilly Isles. Although to English ears Sole sounds like the name of a flounder, to Spanish ears Gran Sol might almost be ironically named. ‘Great Sun’ is the most northerly of the Spanish meteorological sea areas. Going south, they extend as far as the Bight of Benin in the Gulf of Guinea off the coast of Equatorial Africa.
   
In addition to the Spanish, there is also a sequence of sea areas along the coast of Norway stretching north from the Tampens to the Barents Sea. As with Sole these tend to be named after sea banks such as the Roest Bank. There are also mid-sea areas with perfunctory names such as D3 and F2 etc.

This is replicated around the globe to a greater but normally a lesser extent. The Mediterranean Sea, for instance, has no real equivalent to the British Shipping Forecast regions. Across the Atlantic, the United States National Weather Service Marine Forecast uses prosaic terms such as ‘coastal waters from Manasquan Inlet New Jersey, to Little Egg Inlet New Jersey out 20 nautical miles’. By contrast Canada does have a comprehensive system of named meteorological sea areas off Newfoundland.

While Francophonic names such as Banquereau and Fourchu might be expected off the Canadian coast, it’s slightly more surprising to find them off the southern tip of New Zealand which also uses named meteorological sea areas. The regions of Foveaux and Puysegur are to be found in the seas east and west of Stewart Island respectively.

The Foveaux meteorological sea area takes its name from the Foveaux Strait which separates Stewart Island from the South Island. Despite its French-sounding name, the Foveaux Strait is named after Englishman Joseph Foveaux who was governor of New South Wales (which at that time nominally included New Zealand) in the 1800s. Unlike Robert Fitzroy, who served as governor of New Zealand in the 1840s, it’s not believed that Foveaux ever actually visited New Zealand.
 
The Puysegur sea area takes its name from Puysegur Point at the extreme south-west of the South Island. It also gives its name to the adjoining deep-sea trench between the Tasman Sea and the Pacific Ocean. Puysegur Point in turn was named by French naval explorer Jules Dumont d'Urville in the 1820s. It’s believed that he named it after Antoine de Chastenet de Puységur a French naval officer of the 18th Century. Antoine and his older brother Amand, the Marquis de Puységur, were early proponents of hypnosis. Antoine had consulted Franz Mesmer (of Mesmerism fame) to help treat his asthma which had been hindering his naval career and was greatly impressed by the positive result. He then recommended Mesmerism (or animal magnetism) to those around him (including Amand) who then himself became a student of Mesmer and gained a name in his own right as a magnétiseur and a practitioner treating sleeping disorders.




(As well as expensive brandy, the Puységur family has given its name to a meteorological sea area off the coast of New Zealand)


The concept of animal magnetism has since given way to hypnosis which today is viewed as a complementary therapy by the modern medical establishment rather than as a scientific discipline as such. By coincidence, when Dumont d’Urville sailed south from the coasts of New Zealand and Tasmania (after naming Pointe Puységur) he was in search of the Magnetic South Pole which is indeed to be found at that end of the Antarctic continent.

Vizzer wrote:

The Mediterranean Sea, for instance, has no real equivalent to the British Shipping Forecast regions.

That's not really true - although I think you actually knew that already - as the French, Spanish and Italian meteorological services (perhaps others too) also divide up the Mediterranean into regions using their own names that are significant/memorable to their own home nation's sailors.

The following maps are all taken from the online guide issued by the French national meteorological service, Meteo-France.

 

Ever helpful, the French meteorological site also gives the zones as per the Spanish and Italian authorities.





But I imagine also that the Greeks, Turks, Egyptians, Moroccans  ... and others, might well divide the sea up differently, especially considering that there are still on-going disagreements over the sovereignty of quite a few Meditarranean islands and the associated fishing/mineral rights. The Mediterranean is also divided up slightly differently by the international SMDSM naming system, which is principally used to communicate information from the Inmarsat system of weather satellites.



Interestingly after 2011 Meteo-France no longer issues its own radio forecasts for the North Sea nor out into the Atlantic but now issues its French-language forecasts only for the areas from just north of the Straits of Dover down to the Bay of Biscay, plus still of course the Mediterranean.



For the wider Atlantic sea beyond the French areas in the Bay of Biscay and the Channel Approaches Meteo-France now advises sailors to use the English language forecasts given by the British Met office. This makes complete sense: why duplicate effort when you are both basically repeating the same thing (and the Meteo-France guide provides very good translations into French of all the key technical English terms). Nevertheless I think Meteo-France's forecasts are still the preferred source for information covering the western Mediterranean, and then on down the west coast of coast of Africa at least as far as Senegal, Camaroon and la Côte d'Ivoire.

That Meteo-France link is very informative MM and – oops – I stand corrected on the Mediterranean named sea areas. But thanks and - yes - they are in fact very equivalent to the British Shipping Forecast areas. For instance, one might think that the name Crusade for the seas off the Levant could possibly be seen as contentious but then it’s not that different to the British Shipping Forecast using the name Viking for a sea area off Norway.

It’s interesting that the French don’t translate the comically named Boot area off the south of Italy. They use Tamise for Thames after all, so why not La Botte. I suppose though that the Boot area doesn’t fall under Meteo-France’s routine zone of forecast coverage so they just go with the English-language name instead. One wonders, though, who came up with the names.
 
The Italians don’t use the name Boot at all. Neither do they translate it as ‘Stivale’. Instead, they name that area Ionio Settentrionale. And their Ionian sea areas are markedly different both in shape and location from the World Meteorological Organisation’s (WMO) Ionian sea areas. Shades of the Finisterre confusion in the Atlantic perhaps. The Italians also go in for strictly rectangular sea area delineation. 

I agree with Temp and nordmann that the loss of Finisterre from the Shipping Forecast was a pity. It is poetic and romantic and does call to mind old maps with phrases like “here be dragons”. That said – there is a meteorological sea area off the coast of Tierra del Fuego at the tip of South America called ‘Fin del Mundo’.