"There isn't a hurricane." Hours after BBC weather presenter Michael Fish said this at midday on October 15, 1987, southern England was devastated by its worst storm in a century. Here's how this forecast disaster unfolded, and how it reshaped weather forecasting afterward.
In the BBC's midday forecast on October 15, 1987, Michael Fish mentioned that a viewer had called the station worried after hearing a hurricane was coming, and said, "if you're watching, don't worry, there isn't" a hurricane on the way. That night into the early morning, southern England was directly exposed to a storm with gusts reaching 185 km/h.
The storm killed between 18 and 22 people and caused around £1 billion in damage (at the time). 15 million trees were felled, and the power grid was knocked out, leaving millions of households without electricity. It's recorded as one of the strongest storms in UK history since 1703.
At the time, the Met Office's observation network and computer models weren't precise enough to catch a storm rapidly intensifying far out over the Atlantic. Ocean observation data to track the storm was sparse, and numerical model resolution was far lower than today, fundamentally limiting predictions of the storm's track and intensity changes. Michael Fish himself later explained that his comment had actually referred to a hurricane far out in the Atlantic, not a denial of the storm approaching England itself — but the broadcast context was easy to misread.
Following this event, the UK Met Office invested heavily in expanding ocean observation networks and boosting numerical model performance. The observation, numerical modeling, and ensemble forecasting system covered in How Are Weather Forecasts Actually Made? developed in part because of the hard lessons from this failure. When storms of similar scale approached afterward, far earlier and more accurate warnings became possible.
Observation and modeling technology has advanced far beyond 1987, but forecasts still carry uncertainty. Saving the places you check often in sanCheck and checking strong-wind and marine advisories ahead of time helps keep you safe.