 I
think one of the most common questions that I ever get asked, is "how did
you start liking weather?" And this is possibly the most difficult,
as I don't know how I started liking weather, I just did. When I
was 2, in 1985, I remember the Jan 18 supercell quite vividly. We
(my family) were actually visiting relatives in Melbourne at the time,
but I remember phoning relatives to ask if our house was OK. I also
remember seeing the vivid lightning on the news, I had never seen so much
blue lightning before. For this season, I always referred to this
storm as a "blue storm" and I considered it to be the worse type of storm.
For the next couple of years, whenever I heard of a bad storm I said "that
must have been a blue storm!"
I always used to sit at a window and watch the lightning, I loved doing that. But I didn't actually do anything active until I was 7 in 1989, this was when I started tracking tropical cyclones. This interest was further spurred by TC Nancy in 1990, which side-swiped Brisbane. Then I guess it was an exponential interest; the more I learnt about weather, the more I loved it and wanted to learn more about it. This brings about the other question I'm frequently asked; "why do you like weather." Well - I find it so fascinating, the way it's just one enormous jigsaw puzzle. And the way the entire Earth's weather systems interact simultaneously is just mind boggling, and somewhat incomprehensible to the human mind. The other thing I love, is its unpredictability, there's always something different and nothing is quite the same. I guess this all ties into a little saying I made, that is "weather is like an infinite ball of string in knots, undo one knot and you undo many more, but underneath you find even more knots." Most of my life revolves around weather, if you were to ask me what I do when I'm not doing something weather-related, then to be honest, I'd have to say "sleeping." Some people refer this as an 'obsession,' but I refer to it as 'love'. Click on Anthony's
picture to email him...
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