It might be all about higher, faster and stronger on the track – but hotter, wetter, smoggier, will be the motto for an unofficial event at the Beijing Games: weather forecasting.

Teams of experts from seven countries will be competing to be the Olympic forecasting champion. Every three hours scientists from Japan, the US, Australia, Canada, Austria, France and China will be analysing observational data and atmospheric pressure to predict the temperature, humidity and precipitation for the Beijing area for up to 36 hours ahead. Their forecasts will be submitted to the China Meteorological Administration, which will judge them against the weather.

The Weather Demonstration Project is part of a global research programme started in 1999 by the World Meteorological Organisation, the United Nations’ official “voice” on the weather. The project, which featured at the Sydney Games in 2000, is designed to showcase the latest technology used by national agencies.

Japan is favourite to take gold despite making a number of errors in the warm-up competition last year. Kazuo Saito, the team leader, identified the Chinese as a threat, however.

Britain will not be represented. It dropped out of the annual forecast demonstration programme in 2006 because of a lack of resources. “If you look at the other nations taking part, they’re a centrally-funded part of government. We stand or fall on the profit we make,” a spokesman from the Met Office said.

One aim of the exercise is to test advances in the ensemble prediction technique, which reduces the margin for error in long-term forecasting by taking the average value from a collection of forecasts.

The weather has become something of an obsession for the Chinese in the run-up to the Games amid concerns that the athletes will be hampered by extreme heat, humidity and pollution. Haile Gebrselassie, the world record holder for marathon running and an asthma sufferer, has pulled out of the Games because of health concerns.

The Chinese Weather Manipulation Office has employed various techniques to ensure perfect weather at the Games, including cloud-seeding – shooting silver iodide pellets into clouds to induce rainfall away from Olympic venues and help to clear smog. Olympic organisers also bought a multimillion-dollar IBM supercom-puter, which is 1,000 times faster than any weather-forecasting system used in previous Games. It will provide every venue with three-hourly forecasts and half-hourly satellite pictures. The information will be distributed via text messages, television screens, scoreboards and the internet.

The average temperature between August 8 and 24, the duration of the Games, is 25C (77F), with a relative humidity of 77 per cent – well above what is considered comfortable. A study of weather patterns over the past 30 years shows that the chance of rain during the opening ceremony is even, with a 25 per cent chance of thunderstorms. Leaving nothing to chance on the big night, Chinese officials have 26 cloud-dispersal cannon on standby.

Weather modification through the ages

— Before the Greek army sailed to Troy, legend states, Agamemnon sacrificed his daughter, Iphigenia, for fair winds In ancient

— In Ancient Rome rain-making rites included throwing straw puppets into the Tiber

— In 1896 an Austrian winegrower invented a device which produced a giant smoke ring to encourage rain rather than hail

— Between 1962 and 1983 the US sought to decrease the strength of cyclones with silver iodide

— In the Vietnam war the US seeded clouds to encourage heavy rain along the Ho Chi Minh Trail

Source: Euripides, A History of the Roman World, Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory, American Meteorological Society, Archives

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