Shipping Forecast August 2017 was the 150th anniversary of the shipping forecast. The 31 sea areas covering the waters around the British Isles are as defined by the map shown here: The areas were already roughly as listed above by 1949. In 1955, meteorologists from countries with North Sea coastlines met and recommended that the UK's sea area 'Heligoland' be renamed 'German Bight' to reflect more general usage amongst the nations concerned. They also recommended the divisions of 'Dogger' (with the north-eastern portion to be named 'Fisher') and 'Forties' (with the northern half becoming 'Viking'), and the renaming of 'Iceland' as 'South-east
Shipping Forecast in Jasper Fforde's debut novel "The Eyre Affair" are named after Sea Areas in the shipping forecast. Charlie Connelly's 2004 book "Attention All Shipping" (Little Brown: ) describes a project to visit every sea area with any land, and to travel by air or sea over the others. For his project ""The Shipping Forecast - an Artist's Journey", which began in 2015, Troon-based artist Ian Rawnsley plans to travel by sea through each of the sea areas and create a painting inspired by each, to raise funds for Macmillan Cancer Support. In March 2017, Peter Jefferson recorded a reinvented version