Biography

Lisa Burke loves her job as a weather presenter on Sky. It shows in the way she talks about it and in the other career in science she put aside to follow the weather.

Her office at Sky is full of sources of weather information. She is proud of the fact that Sky does its own weather forecasting and doesn’t just read out someone else’s forecast.

She says her work is adding together "all the different bits of information, which includes words from other forecasters in the Met Office saying what they think of the models. We’ve got temperature charts, isobaric charts… satellite pictures. We try and compile our own picture of the weather."

However, for someone who loves science and its formality, she says she has chosen a strange job. Every day she works with apparent contradictions and has to use her own judgment rather than rely on scientific certainties.

Her career could have been quite different though.

Lisa Burke was born in 1977 and lived in Ireland until she was 10, when her family moved to Essex. She was always quite academic and enjoyed school.

She was very interested in science from an early age and studied it for GCSE and A Levels, including an extra maths A Level.

Part of her decision was linked to seize opportunities when she was young that might not be available to her as she got older. With science, she says that she knew that if she didn’t study it, that it was something that could be very difficult to come back to later in life. It was time to seize the day.

This guided her choice at university also. She went to Cambridge and studied natural science. She graduated in 1999 with a first-class masters degree in natural sciences. She came second in the university, won two university prizes and was made a scholar of New Hall.

She took a year out and went to work in chemistry with a pharmaceutical company and was all set for a PhD and a career in science when the call came from Sky.

She had been in Sky for day trips from school and had done some work experience there during college. Her now boss Francis Wilson kept approaching her to come and be a weather presenter, but the timing was never right.

Eventually, she joined Sky News in 2000 on a six-month contract. In 2001 she was voted "sexiest weather girl of all-time" in a poll of 1,000 men.

She says that the most difficult things for her to predict are cloud cover and showers. By their nature they are extremely changeable and can be over and done with in a very sort amount of time.