WEATHERMAN Tomasz Schafernaker went down a storm when he gave a talk on all things meteorological.

The BBC presenter, recently voted the country’s most popular weather broadcaster, was the speaker at Bolton School’s latest free Evening Enrichment Lecture.

He told an audience of pupils, school staff and members of the community, about his career - from its earliest days to recent projects including his experiences of Hurricane Irma in September.

The TV favourite told of how his interest in the weather was first piqued as a nine-year-old when he misheard a report about a ‘Cyclops’ wreaking havoc in Australia.

To his disappointment, it was a cyclone, rather than the mythical monster, but he was bitten by the weather bug.

His lifelong fascination led to him becoming a broadcast assistant at the BBC Weather Centre and on to presenting the weather live on regional television.

At the age of 21 he had the responsibility of representing both the Met Office and the BBC.

He told the audience: “I couldn’t believe I was predicting at 9am that a cloud would form at 11am, and then it happened.”

His more recent projects include filming in the Rocky Mountains, where he met a research time working on snow and cloud ‘seeding’.

“It was like watching science fiction in action,” he said. “That was in March , so even now meteorology still surprises me.”

He also described the drama of watching deadly Hurricane Irma ‘building and building’ during a visit to Florida in September.

And the meteorologist told pupils with a passion for science to ‘have fun with it’ and make mistakes in order to learn from them.

This event was organised and hosted by Bolton School Girls’ Division. The talks will continue in the New Year with a lecture from Dr Peter Vardy, philosopher and theologian, on Sexual Ethics. The full programme of events is available at boltonschool.org