When qualified skipper Peter Herbert realised that 80% of professional boat captains in the Mediterranean were actually British, he decided to offer English weather forecasts, based on official French government data.

BBC: NEWS | Business | Bad weather's silver lining

As master of Balliol College, Oxford from 1989-94 the first American to hold the post, and the first scientist he would pedal out eagerly into the countryside, his burly frame well waterproofed against the English weather, to see what he might see.

ECONOMIST: Barry Blumberg

Thousands of fans braved the predictably English summer weather (torrential rain interspersed with steamingly unpleasant bursts of heat) to pack into the hall of the Brighton Centre to see and play both current and unreleased PC games.

FORBES: Rezzed: One-Hour Game Jammers Create Jesus, 'Murder Simulators' And Inspiring Errors

China's weather-modification experts have published relatively little in English.

WSJ: Blizzard Renews Storm Over China Making Snow

Lewis Fry Richardson, an English meteorologist and mathematician, was ridiculed for his suggestion in 1922 that it might be possible to predict the weather using an army of thousands of mathematicians, sitting at desks in a vast arena and passing slips of paper to each other.

ECONOMIST: Weather maps