Hi, I'm Brady Harron and welcome to the Numberphile podcast. Today's guest is Dan Harris,

a chief meteorologist at the UK Met Office. The Met Office for those who don't know is the

UK's chief national weather and climate service. They're the ones who tell you whether you need

to take an umbrella out today. Its headquarters is in Exeter and that's

where I met with Dan. And even for someone who works in this field, you're going to learn Dan has an

uncommon and lifelong passion for the weather. But we'll get to that zone. My name's Dan and I'm a chief meteorologist here at the Met Office.

So tell me what that means, because if you were to go up to someone in the street and say,

I'm chief meteorologist, that would make me think you were the boss of the place.

Like, you decide the weather forecast every day.

Like, what does that mean?

Well, yeah. So, I mean, my official job title is chief meteorologist. When I tell people on

the street or tell friends what I do, I tend to say chief forecaster. I think that means a bit more

to people than chief meteorologist. But chief forecasters maybe doesn't then encompass the full extent

of what we do. So I work in what's called the expert weather hub, which is a team of

chief meteorologists and deputy chief meteorologists. And we're the top team in operational

meteorology in the Met Office. But there's more than one chief. You aren't the, the chief,

you're a chief. No, I'm part of a team of chief meteorologists. That's why I said I'm a chief meteorologist rather than the chief meteorologist.

And we work a 24-7 roster here at the Met Office.

So there's always someone on forecasting duty.

Of course, if you're working 24-7, then you need a team to cover that roster.

So at the moment, I mean, we generally have anything between seven and ten chiefs at any one

time, just depending on how much non-operational work there is to be done as well. But on the

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