Every Three Hours

During the 1990's, the number of large manned weather stations in Sweden was drastically cut from around 200 to less than 20. Judit Martin, weather observer in Zinkgruvan, one of the stations which was closed, realized that it was high time to document a profession which was on its way to disappearing. For her, who once upon a time left sunny California and ended up reporting the weather every three hours in the often harsh weather in faraway Sweden, the step from thought to action is never long. With the help of her rather unreliable car, a camera, and tape recorder, she set out from the forests of the province of Närke on an interviewing journey which took her to observers from Falsterbo in the far south to Naimakka in the far north. The result is this book. As the author herself points out, this is not a book about observing the weather, but rather, it is about the lives of the people who observed it, and about a Sweden in the midst of rapid changes. Hopefully the day is still far away when we have to sum up for good the job the corps of observers has carried out. When a meteorologist himself can choose, he still chooses observations carried out by well-educated and motivated observers over those done by a never so well-equipped automatic station. When an observer studies the weather he also performs, with the help of his sight and brain, a qualified form of distance analysis which probably even the most sophisticated future high technology will have difficulty surpassing. (Haldo Vedin, Meteorologist) Judit Martin was born in America, but has lived in rural Sweden since 1969. As a single mother, she raised her two daughters while teaching English and working as a weather observer for the Swedish weather bureau [SMHI]. When human observers were replaced by automated weather stations, she immortalized the people who had had that unusual occupation in a book published by the weather bureau that is the basis for this book. She has written two documentary books in Swedish as well as two historical novels, "Augusta's Daughter" and "Kajsa", depicting 19th century peasant life in Sweden, and also a number of short stories published as "Seventeen Stories". Her photo book, "Swedish Medieval Church Painting" was recently published by Terrestrius Press Ltd.