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Sir Ian McKellen proved that you can happily watch a good actor read from the phone book, although in this case, the Lord of the Rings, X-Men and RSC actor recited the Beaufort scale at a special event at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich.
The world’s top meteorologist, including the School of Health, Natural and Social Sciences’ Dr Dennis Wheeler gathered in Greenwich on January 14 to mark the 200th anniversary of Francis Beaufort creating the scale. The Beaufort scale is a meteorological chart describing the effects of wind force, from zero (calm) to 12 (hurricane). Sir Ian McKellen enacts the scale as the encore to his one-man show ‘A Knight Out’, which he presented especially for the event. Sir Ian starts off serenely with the early stages of wind disturbance. "Two. Light breeze. Wind felt on face," he says, eyes half closed, apparently enjoying a gentle breeze on his cheek. By the time he gets to 10 ("Who-oole gale! Trees uprooted!"), he is howling in the storm!
Dr Dennis Wheeler is involved in a £10m project which is expected to produce the most detailed climate record in Europe’s history. The Sunderland climatologist is working with a team of academics from around Europe on the Millennium project, which will give us a detailed climate record for the continent over the past 1,000 years. Dr Wheeler’s area of expertise is logbook records. In 2000 he won a £300,000 grant for an innovative international project which used 200-year-old weather records held in ships’ logbooks from around Europe.