Good Morning Britain weather presenter Laura Tobin has revealed she was in floods of tears when the UK reached 40C for the first time. In her new book, Come Rain or Shine, she opens up about her career, her passion for meteorology, and the emotional impact of witnessing climate change firsthand.
A Career in Weather
Tobin has been forecasting the weather for 22 years. “I have been forecasting the weather for 22 years and I want to share my passion for it and why understanding it has never mattered more,” she says. Her book is partly autobiographical but packed with facts, inspired by her popular 6.15am science segment on Good Morning Britain.
Her fellow presenter Kate Garraway says: “Every time I chat to Laura, I come away with another incredible weather fact that changes the way I look at the world around me.” In June, Tobin received the Royal Meteorological Society’s Michael Hunt award for communicating meteorology to a non-scientific audience. She has over 220,000 followers on social media.
From School Lessons to Life-Saving Forecasts
Her weather obsession began aged 14 at Duston School in Northampton. Her geography teacher Mr Hannant explained the jet stream by having the boys and girls line up and run across the room while pushing against each other. “After that lesson I sort of fell in love with the weather,” she writes.
Tobin gained A-levels in mathematics, physics and art before graduating from the University of Reading with a degree in physics and meteorology. She started her career with the Met Office at the Cardiff Weather Centre, then moved to RAF Brize Norton providing aeronautical meteorology reports to Royal Air Force transport crews and the British Forces Broadcasting Service.
She recalls one incident where a crew were flying back from Cyprus with an urgent request because their plane’s anti-freezing system had failed. “The crew’s lives were in my hands,” she says. “I had to pull together all my training and experience to guide them back safely.”
Climate Change and Tears
Tobin has delivered reports from the top of a mountain in Austria to a glacier in Svalbard, a remote Norwegian archipelago in the Arctic Ocean. “Svalbard is my favourite place in the world, the landscape is breathtaking,” she says. She heard tales from locals of starving polar bears and emaciated reindeer and admits, “It was the first time I had seen climate change at such close range.”
On July 19, 2022, the highest reading reached 40.3°C (104.5°F) at RAF Coningsby in Lincolnshire. “That was an absolutely awful day for us meteorologists,” she recalls. “I was in floods of tears.” Meanwhile this September was provisionally the joint fourth warmest on record for the UK, according to figures from the Met Office. With warmer than average weather forecast for the rest of the year, 2026 is on track to become one of the warmest years on record.
Tobin believes in educating people about the science of climate change. “After Svalbard I decided that one of the most important things you can do to tackle climate change is talk about it. So that’s what I vowed to do,” she says. Come Rain or Shine is dedicated to her daughter Charlotte, who she describes as “my little ray of sunshine”. The book is out now, published by New River at £16.99.
