For many people, the easiest form of small talk with a stranger is to talk about the weather. But not for Roger Badham. Recently awarded an Order of Australia Medal (OAM) in the King’s Birthday Honours for his services to meteorology, it is a subject he takes very seriously indeed.
It’s fair to say that, in conversation, he appears underwhelmed by the prestige of his new gong. Around the world, especially in the field of competitive sailing, it will add neither currency nor cachet. To sailors, and to his international network of clients and his mates, Badham is known simply as Clouds. It’s a nickname he got in Perth in 1985 while working with the crew of Australia II during the America’s Cup and it stuck.
Roger Badham, 74, grew up on the waterfront at Cronulla but spent most of his adult life planting vast numbers of native trees on acreage under the escarpment and using rare timbers he has collected over the years to restore old wooden boats.
Science and nature were on his radar from early on: his father was a radiologist and his mother was a landscape architect. As a child, he developed a love of competitive surf swimming and of sailing in dinghies along the beaches of the Northern Illawarra, so he was always aware of the swell and the wind. After failing to get in to study medicine, he opted for pharmacology and chemistry and pursued his interest in maths and physics. But, describing himself as “an outdoors man”, he was not interested in statistics, and wanted to find a practical way to apply his interest in the weather – at a time when courses in climatology were limited.
But times changed and with the rise of the internet he found himself swamped with requests from individuals and organisations, all eager for his specialised expertise in forecasting the smallest variations in wind and temperature over a period of a couple of hours. His work has taken him all over the world, but these days he can do most of it from his home in Wombarra (where the original slatted wooden box he used to shelter his measuring instruments now serves as his mailbox) and predicts that he will be replaced in a few years by the power of quantum computing. He plans to retire next year, after the Olympics and the America’s Cup.
His best known and most long-standing clients have included the Ferrari team for whom he does the forecasting for the Formula One circuit (“never got a car out of them”, he quips); the New Zealand sailing team at the Olympics (“unfortunately that means very early starts as they are two hours ahead and they train first thing”); and various crews competing in big competitions like the Whitbread Round the World Race. He’s done more than 40 Sydney to Hobart Yacht Races, including the disastrous 1998 race during which a ‘super cell’ storm event killed six sailors, and which prompts painful memories of testifying as an expert witness at the subsequent State Coroner’s Inquest.
As for his favourite weather phenomenon, Roger replies without hesitation: mammatus clouds, an unusual pattern of bulges or pouches emerging from the base of a cloud (which he describes more poetically as “full breasts hanging from the sky”) during warm-weather storms. So now we know what to look for when summer comes.
