GREAT King Street Edinburgh, was a little nest of meteorologists in the middle of the last century. Thomas Stevenson, lighthouse engineer and father of the novelist Robert Louis, lived there and is remembered as the designer of the small louvered box in which, even today, we measure the temperature of the air.
And further down the road lived Alexander Buehan.
Buchan carried out a detailed statistical study of Scottish weather in the 1850s, and presented his findings in the Journal of die Scottish Meteorological Society in 1867, in a famous paper called Interruptions in the Regular Rise and Fall of Temperature in the Course of the Year. He had come to the conclusion that certain periods of the year were significantly colder or warmer than they ought to be, and identified six cold periods and three unseasonably warm ones.
The warm spells were July 12th-25th, August 12-15, and December 3rd-14th, and the cold spells February 7th-14, April 11th-14th, May 9th-14th, June 29th to July 4th, August 6th-11th, and November 6th-13th. And astute readers will not have failed to notice that his cold spell in May coincides closely with the harsh conditions we have just recently experienced.
As it happens, meteorologists nowadays treat "Buchan's Spells", as they are called, with scepticism, since more sophisticated statistical analysis over longer periods does not support their regular existence. Indeed, in fairness to Buchan, he himself never claimed that his spells were an infallible guide to the weather, and only suggested that they seemed to apply in his native part of Scotland. But still, even nowadays, the relevant periods are eagerly watched by those with an interest in these matters.
Some of Buchan's other findings have been more resilient. In 1868, for example, only 10 years after Buys Ballot had enunciated his famous law about the direction in which the wind blows around a depression, Buchan refined the theory from his observations of the North Atlantic: "Thus the wind blows neither in a circle round the centre of a depression, nor directly towards the centre, but in a direction between the two. In effect, the direction of the wind at any place makes an angle of 60 to 80 with the line which would be drawn from the place to the centre of the depression."
But the good that men do is often interred with their bones. Alexander Buchan died 90 years ago today, on May 13th, 1907 right in the middle of one of his own alleged cold periods - and is remembered only for the spurious "spells" that bear his name.