There is no bigger frustration at Wimbledon than rain delaying matches. But the All England Club has revealed that it has deployed a secret weapon to assess the weather – a water-filled plastic bucket guarded by a rubber duck mascot named John QuackEnroe.
The club has an on-site weather station and millions of pounds worth of radar kit which can accurately predict the weather, minute-by-minute, on each court.
The high-resolution radar, which is also used at the French Open, and for motor racing events at Silverstone, launches beams into clouds approaching SW19 every 20 seconds.
But the club also uses less sophisticated equipment. The duck-and-bucket setup is attached to an infrared camera which allows officials to see how heavy rain drops are.
Paul Abeillé from Meteo France, which owns the radar equipment, joked: “That is the most important instrument.
“That is very important for us, because depending on the rain you’ve got big drops, small drops, and you can see how the drops are falling into the water and imagine what is happening on the courts.
“My radar is quite expensive, but this is a few pounds. We have an infrared camera on it so we can see it night and day.”
Met Office meteorologist Abby Smith, who works alongside Abeillé at SW19, added: “It doesn’t measure anything. They look at it and go: ‘It’s definitely raining.’”
The pair told how the weather station relays information to a central office which makes calls on whether to suspend play or cover courts. But sometimes officials disagree.
Smith said: “Sometimes the umpire will come in and be like: ‘I’m not sure about that cloud.’”
She added: “We’re leading those planning decisions about whether to close the roof on courts and tracking showers as they form and then looking at how fast they’re moving.
“And then when they get to about the hour out from current time we hand over to Meteo France who have this amazing high-resolution radar.”
Abeillé said: “This radar can provide an image with 100m resolution with an accuracy of every minute, so we know exactly where the rain cells are [and] the speed of the rain cells, and with all the things on our screen, we can have the information about how heavy it will rain and on which court it will start.”
Abeillé revealed Wimbledon is “the most fun” sporting event because of its unpredictable weather. “It’s more fun here than Bahrain,” he joked. “I love to forecast here because it changes all the time.”
