A cracking May took away our sulky gait

Country Living with Francis Farragher

Just as we were all slipping into a bit of a sulk about our wet Winter and cold Spring, then along came glorious May to blow away our melancholia, like a fresh breeze from the West dissipating the lighter than light seedlings of those wicked dandelions.

Our May weather and glorious end to the month might be a bit like the tale of the small pig – “it didn’t last long, but it was nice while it lasted” – however our fifth month of the year lifted the mood of the nation quite dramatically.

One of my old friends in the IFA, Roy O’Brien, always said to me that regardless of how bad things were going in farming, a fine week of weather always lifted the spirits even if there wasn’t a corresponding fillip to their bank accounts.

It’s not as though we’re bad minded, or anything like that, but there was a little smugness over the past week or two as we looked at weather pictures from across Europe and indeed parts of England too where torrential downpours and violent thunderstorms were the order of the day.

For those who had early Summer holiday stays booked in different places across Europe, it must have been terribly disheartening to be leaving behind the wall-to-wall sunshine of Clifden, Clonbur or Clonfert and flying into deluges of wind and rain in ‘gay Paris’. [old meaning of the word]

The theory is being put forward that our climate is all ‘upside down’ – with every weather vagary attributed to climate change – but in reality the big influence on our weather patterns across Europe over the past few weeks has been the Jet Stream.

At its simplest, the Jet Stream is a high flying ribbon of air, six to ten miles above the earth’s surface that’s caused by the rotation of the earth (The Coriolis Effect) and also impacted upon by the turbulent boundaries that can exist between warm and cold air masses.

Jet Streams exist in both hemispheres but the one impacting on our weather normally represents the boundary between the polar air to the north and the warmer, mid-latitude air to the south, a conflux often referred to as the Polar Front.

The Jet Streams travel at speeds of between 100mph and 200mph in a west to east direction, blowing in from the Atlantic, their direction being determined by the rotation of the earth.

Because Jet Streams coincide with zones where cold and warm air meet, there will always be turbulence, rainfall and wind so ‘the trick’ is to avoid this air mass at all costs but alas we have no influence over its path.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.