Letters / Are you wearing a Fladen or a frock? We deserve an answer we can trust
Should I leave the washing out while I walk round the voe? Should I wear the waterproofs and sweat or take the chance and maybe get soaking wet? … I need your help with my weather-related uncertainty.
I presumed there was a glitch, a Covid related short term outage in the weather radar when we arrived in 2020. Surely Shetland can’t be the only place in Europe without rain radar? It was. And six years later, it still is.
I became so fed up with reading the horizon for answers, that I found a solution.
Rain radar data is like magic, like internet access: once you have it, you can’t go back. It feels like a basic human right in the rest of Europe.
Weather radar makes the most sense in remote rural settings where outdoor life is unavoidable. Yet it is denied to us because the thinking which dictates it’s provisioning is mainland centric.
Tavish Scott tried; he got kicked back. “You don’t have a large enough water catchment area or population to justify it.”
Also, Shetland is literally under the radar: 2000m under the nearest C-Band Horizon.
Those reasons are not good enough for a nerd like me with history in radar and communications, so I’ve dug deeper and found a solution.
Faroe, as usual, is organised enough to have done it. They use a much cheaper X-Band technology. We can too.
I’ve written and sent a technical and economic analysis to Shetland Islands Council which shows we could be realising a 19:1 benefit to cost ratio from weather radar.
Weather is not a minor inconvenience. Every major sector of Shetland’s economy depends on short-range weather intelligence that the existing network structurally denies us. We pay for this gap. We suffer the avoidable power outages and pay for the slower deployment of repairs. We make the risky go/no-go decisions about offshore harvesting operations based on limited forecasts inferred from remote and irrelevant equipment.
Our crofters make lambing and shearing decisions based on regional forecasts that miss the micro-variations across a landscape as varied as ours.
Our ferry skippers and harbour pilots work with data that serves Aberdeen’s needs, not Lerwick’s. Our tourism operators — wildlife boats, excursion companies, guesthouse owners — try to sell visitors a Shetland experience with a weather forecast that cannot reliably cover the next two hours over a specific voe.
The rest of Europe considers this a solved problem. In the Faroe Islands — same latitude, same Atlantic weather, small population — Atlantic Airways has had a compact local weather radar running unattended on Sornfelli mountain for over four years. It cost around £200,000. It pays for itself every time a helicopter pilot gets an accurate read on the rainfall between the islands before take off.
That same technology, would give every person in Shetland something they have never had: a real-time, hyper-local picture of what the weather is actually doing here, not somewhere above us and 160 kilometres away.
A formal cost-benefit analysis has been submitted to the Shetland Islands Council. It shows that a local weather radar would generate verified economic benefits of nearly £1 million per year against an annual running cost of £50,000. That is a 19-to-1 return on investment — better than the national average for Met Office spending, because Shetland’s economy is more weather-dependent than anywhere else in Britain.
We are not asking for a luxury. We are asking for the same basic meteorological infrastructure that the rest of the UK, and indeed the rest of Europe, takes entirely for granted.
The information that tells you whether to wear a Fladen or a frock to Up Helly Aa should not be a local mystery. In Shetland, of all places, it should be the one thing we can count on.
We encourage the SIC to act on this report without delay. The kit exists. The case is proven. Ronas Hill is waiting.
Roderick Read
Co-Convenor of Shetland Green Party
