George James Symons

George James Symons FRS (6 Aug 1838 - 10 Mar 1900) was a British meteorologist who founded and managed the British Rainfall Organisation, an unusually dense and widely distributed network of rainfall data collection sites throughout the British Isles.

He was born in Pimlico, London. In the late 1850s at about age 20 he studied at the Normal School of Science, which prepared its students to be secondary school science teachers. His physics teacher at the school was John Tyndall, who was also a scientific advisor to the U.K. Board of Trade. Symons got a job in the meteorological department at the Board of Trade in 1860 on the strength of Tyndall's recommendation. That meteorological department is the forerunner of today's U.K. Meteorological Office, but at the time its main mission was to upgrade collection of weather data at sea to help predict sea storms.

In 1860 Symons published the first annual volume of British Rainfall, which contained records from 168 land stations in England and Wales. Three years later he resigned his appointment at the Board of Trade, where his rainfall inquiries were not appreciated by his boss Robert FitzRoy - at least not as a prior study of storm-warnings — and then devoted his whole energies to the organisation of a band of volunteer observers for the collection of particulars of rainfall throughout the British Isles. So successful was he in this object that by 1866 he was able to show results which gave a fair representation of the distribution of rainfall, and the number of recorders gradually increased until the last volume of British Rainfall which he lived to edit (that for 1899) contained figures from 3528 stations—2894 in England and Wales, 446 in Scotland, and 188 in Ireland. He printed a monthly rainfall bulletin which evolved into the "Meteorological Magazine".

Apart from their scientific interest, his annual reports are of great practical importance, since they afford engineers and others engaged in water supply much-needed data for their calculations, the former absence of which had on some occasions given rise to grave mistakes. Symons himself devoted special study not only to rainfall, but also to the evaporation and percolation of water as affecting underground streams, and his extensive knowledge rendered him a valuable witness before parliamentary committees. He was responsible for the first systematic recording of rainfall patterns in Britain and Ireland, and never received any payment for his work.

In June 1878 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, his candidacy citation recording that he was: "Author (1) of a series of annual volumes on the rainfall of the British Isles from 1860 to 1870 (2) of a paper on the same subject ordered to be printed in extenso among the reports of the Brit. Ass. 1862 (3) of subsequent yearly reports on the same subject in the same publications (4) of papers on Anemometry at Bermuda and Halifax published in Admiral FitzRoy's series of Board of Trade Meteorological Papers, and of several minor articles in those publications (5) of several papers on underground temperature incorporated in recent reports to the British Association (6) of the revised edition of Petermann's Hydrographical Map. Designer of the Storm Rain Gauge (for indicating extremely heavy falls of short duration), of the Altameter (for measuring angular elevation), and of various forms of Meteorological Instruments for experimental purposes - Designer also of elaborate experiments which have led to improvements in (1) rain gauges and (2) solar radiation thermometers, and of other experiments still in progress relating to (3) thermometer stands, and (4) the amount of evaporation from a water surface.

In other branches of meteorology also he took a keen interest, and he was particularly indefatigable, though consistently unsuccessful, in the quest of a genuine thunderbolt. The history of the science too attracted his attention, and he possessed a fine library of meteorological works, which passed to the Royal Meteorological Society at his death. Of that society he became a member when only eighteen, and he retained his connection with it in various official capacities up to the end of his life. He served as its president in 1880, and in view of the celebration of its jubilee was re-elected to that office in 1900, but the illness that caused his death prevented him from acting.

He died in London on the 10th of March 1900, and was buried at Kensal Green Cemetery in London.