The amateur Sheffield meteorologist taking on clickbait weather stories

Good afternoon members — and welcome to Tuesday’s Tribune newsletter.

Our piece today is about the British obsession with the weather. It starts with a confession from me but develops into a lovely story about one Sheffield man’s attempt to counteract the rising tide of “clickbait” weather stories.

If there’s a person or organisation in Sheffield who deserves some recognition for going above and beyond to help others, please let us know on editor@sheffieldtribune.co.uk.

Mini-briefing

1. An excellent story by local democracy reporter Molly Williams picked up by The Star and Yorkshire Live about people living in atrocious conditions in a Sheffield City Council operated tower block. The Robertshaw building at the top of Netherthorpe Road is described by one resident as unsafe and unsanitary. “You wouldn’t put a dog in those conditions,” says former council leader Peter MacLoughlin, who has lived there for more than 30 years. “There is no excuse for what has gone on here.”
2. An interesting BBC story in light of our recent piece about efforts to rewild northern Sheffield. The government has pledged £15m in additional funding for a tree planting scheme to extend the Northern Forest, an area of tree cover which it is hoped will one day stretch from the Mersey to the Humber estuaries. Three million trees have already been planted as part of the scheme, with the extra funding to go towards a further one million trees or 1,660 acres of woodland.
3. A good investigation by Now Then and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism into housing repossessions in Sheffield. Reporter Shahed Ezaydi found that since the government ended the ban on bailiff evictions in May 2021, 71% of rent possession cases have ended with evictions, with some tenants given as little as 14 days to leave their homes. In one extreme case unearthed by the investigation, a tenant in Sheffield was evicted despite owing less than £300 to her landlord.
4. Peddler night market in Neepsend returns to its 92 Burton Street warehouse this weekend for their seventh birthday. The hugely popular event runs on Friday 1 and Saturday 2 October and features street food, music and an art market from 5pm-11pm on both days. Food this weekend comes from among others vegan street food stall Bamboo, Gravy Train Poutine and Flying Cow burgers. Music comes from 12-piece brass band Renegade on Friday and Apricot Ballroom on Saturday.

I have a confession to make. As some of you may know, before setting up The Tribune I used to work at The Star. I learned a lot in the three-and-a-bit years I worked there and remain very grateful for the experience. But I also learned some darker arts while I was there as well. One of which was how to write that ever-so-common staple of local news websites: the hyperbolic weather story.

You know the ones I mean. The stories with shouty, capped up headlines which scream the words HEATWAVE, SNOW or STORM at you. Once clicked, unwitting readers are then given seven or eight paragraphs of guff before the one payoff sentence: it might be slightly hotter in than usual in South Yorkshire tomorrow or there is a 5% chance of a dusting of snow on Sheffield’s far western fringe in three days’ time.

Newspaper websites do these stories because they know people will click on them. Other favorites are cast-iron predictions that Sheffield will be “hotter than Ibiza” this week, or “hour-by-hour” forecasts of exactly when and where snow will land over the next 24 hours. But The Star is far from the only culprit. Reach-owned website Yorkshire Live predicted a heatwave almost every day during August, only for it to turn out to be a complete washout.

Into this breach of “fake meteorological news” and “alternative weather facts” comes Steel City Skies, a Facebook page billed as “weather forecasts for Sheffield without the hyperbole.” The page is the brainchild of 33-year-old Stephen Vincent, from Ecclesfield, who started it in 2017 after people at his work suggested he turn his interest in meteorology into a public service.

“They knew I was a bit of a weather nut,” says Stephen, who in his day job is a teaching assistant and forest schools practitioner at Grenoside Primary School. “People kept on asking me whether we were going to get any snow days this term. So I decided to set up the Facebook page.”

Initially it was just colleagues and friends who subscribed; then friends of friends found out about it and grew his audience a bit more. But the real breakthrough came when he started commenting on The Star’s notoriously excitable weather stories (some of which I may even have written myself) with his own more measured take. Soon he had a sizable Facebook following of around 2,500, plus more on Twitter and Instagram.

Four years later and the Steel City Skies’ forecasting schedule is now a well-oiled machine. Stephen does a daily forecast at around 6am every day, predicting what the weather will be like for Sheffield over the next 24 hours. He then does a weekend forecast on Thursday and another which goes out on Sunday looking at the week ahead. “Bonus forecasts” sometimes follow if there are any big changes afoot.

When I catch up with him on the phone one afternoon last week just after he’s finished another busy day at school, at one point in the conversation he tells me he has to do the forecast at 6am every day. Why, I ask him: no one is making him do it, are they? “It’s become a ritual for me — it’s the first thing I do when I wake up,” he admits. “But it’s actually become a really nice part of my life. Lots of people engage with the page and comment to say thanks or just to talk about the weather.” 

A quick look at Stephen’s page backs up what he says. Many Facebook news sites (mentioning no names) often seem to bring out the worst in people, but in comparison Steel City Skies is a haven of supportive, respectful discourse. After a positive forecast he posted last Friday, one commenter said: “Thanks, off out to lunch but looks like I don't need wellies.”

After I tentatively admit to having occasionally written the odd hyperbolic weather story myself, he quickly forgives me. “My opinion of them has changed over the years,” he explains. “I used to find them annoying but since I set up the page I now see them as an opportunity to put a more realistic take out there. We can elbow in there with more specific information or more detail. So there’s kind of a symbiotic relationship between myself and The Star now.”

While the mainstream media do use genuine sources and aren’t lying when they make their predictions, he says their stories just lack the usual caveats and nuance that comes with professional forecasting. But Stephen does add an important warning for those who regularly peddle misinformation: putting out forecasts that turn out not to be true will damage your reputation in the end.

Stephen isn’t a qualified meteorologist himself and describes his forecasting as an “amateur obsession”. But as a result of his keen interest and talking at length to others in the field he has picked up lots of knowledge that would normally be reserved only for the meteorological profession. This means he can now read weather charts and interpret complex data, and has even started attending weather conferences in his spare time.

His obsession with all things meteorological began when he was a child. Rather than footballers, celebrity weathermen like Paul Hudson from Look North and national figures such as Michael Fish and Rob McElwee were his heroes growing up. But he admits it hasn’t always been like that.

“I used to be petrified of storms when I was younger but over time that fear was eventually replaced by fascination,” he says. Now, rather than being scared of inclement weather, he relishes it — although he acknowledges UK “storm-chasing” is not quite as dangerous as its American equivalent. “We don’t get extreme enough weather here but it’s kind of a British version of that,” he says.

That said, there were some impressive electrical storms in May this year, when lightning illuminated Sheffield’s night sky for hours and caused damage to several properties. After that, however, summer was a “bit underwhelming”, he says: there was only one decent heatwave and August was abject. September, as it so often is these days, was lovely.

As for the challenges of predicting the weather in Sheffield, the city’s position in the rain shadow of the Peak District can sometimes mean weather systems “fizzle out over the hills,” meaning it can often be quite a bit drier than notoriously damp Manchester. And then there’s the added complications of Sheffield’s famous seven hills, where snow can sometimes be lying six inches deep on the higher ground while the city centre sees none.

But he gets a lot of help from across the Pennines in the form of Martin Miles, another amateur weather forecaster who runs Manchester Weather (they were covered by our sister paper The Mill here). “Martin’s been like a mentor to me,” says Stephen. “I’ve taken a lot of inspiration for Steel City Skies from what he’s done in Manchester.”

And amid the altruism, he does make one concession towards having some semblance of a hobby/life balance: he schedules his Saturday forecast the night before so he doesn’t have to get up on the weekend. But far from seeing it as a chore, Stephen seems genuinely to enjoy providing something that people find useful. “I never set it up to make money or anything like that,” he tells me. “I’m going to carry on as long as it’s fun.”

From next week Stephen will be providing the weather forecast for The Tribune's weekly briefing. You can also follow Steel City Skies on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram.