Bill Giles OBE was born at Dittisham, near Dartmouth, south Devon and retired from the Met Office in January 2000 after leading the team of broadcast meteorologists since 1983.

One of his first appointments in the Met Office was as an observer at during the British H-bomb tests in the south Pacific. After numerous postings with the Royal Air Force and a tour of duty as a lecturer at the Met Office College, he started his broadcasting career on BBC radio in 1972 followed by a move to BBC television in 1975.

In 1983 he became the Senior National broadcaster with further promotion to Principal Scientific Officer in 1987. He was promoted to Grade1 (Senior Principal Scientific Officer) in 1998 in charge of all the BBC weather services together with all the Met Office national and regional broadcasters on the BBC.

Her Majesty THE Queen appointed him an Officer of the most excellent order of the British Empire in the 1995 New Year's Honours for services to broadcast meteorology and he was the subject of "This is your life" in 1998. Ten years later he was awarded the prestigious Broadcast Meteorology Award by the European Meteorological Society in Amsterdam for outstanding contribution to weather broadcasting.

Bill has spoken and chaired conferences in many parts of the world and has been performing his humorous after dinner speeches for over 25 years. He is an authority on climate change and was the first person to suggest that before then of this century the Mediterranean could become uninhabitable.

He is married to Maureen, has two children, and now lives in Oxfordshire. In his retirement he has become a fund-raising Patron for Iain Rennie Hospice at home, a local charity which enables terminally ill patients to spend their last days at home with their family.

Talk teasers:
How do we forecast the climate 50 or 100 years ahead when forecasting for just 5 days is very difficult?
 
Do you know the difference between a sunny interval and a sunny period or isolated, scattered and occasional showers?

How did Michael Fish miss the "hurricane" in 1987?
What is the second most important weather phenomena on the planet?