A time for icicles to hang and the shepherd to blow his nail

Country Living with Francis Farragher

There I was the other night among a court of the elders in the local hostelry finding myself being heavily castigated for allegedly not having any knowledge of the horrible Winter of snow, icicles, frost and all things arctic that lies ahead of us for the season of darkness.

Maybe the big chill will arrive, but after all, we are coming into wintertime when we expect to turn on the oil heating regularly and keep the stove topped up with all kinds of stuff that the Greens don’t like us burning, such as turf, firewood or coal.

TheSo how much store, if any, should we place on the long term forecasts, whether they be scientifically based or leaning more towards the realms of quackery. It’s probably a case of ‘you pays your money and you takes your choice’.

Weather forecasting is neither a simple nor an exact science and when I hear of people ‘swearing by’ some of the long term forecasts, I wonder how organisations like the British Met Service, whose budget extends to hundreds of millions, are often hard pressed to get an accurate forecast for five days ahead.

Last month, the UK Met Office announced that they were spending €97 million on a super-computer (super by the way is apparently new buzz word) to be built in Exeter next Spring and to be up and running by September 2015.

The UK Met. Office have got all excited about their new piece of gadgetry, predicting that it will give them ‘more precision, more detail and more accuracy in their forecasts for the next day, the next week, the next month and even the next century’.

Now that’s one side of the meteorological coin, but over recent days as I was doing a small trawl through the net, I came across a piece last month on a little community radio station in Roscommon, called Ros FM, where they had a lengthy interview with one Ken Ring, the famous New Zealand pseudo/scientific long range weather forecaster.

After the UK Met. Office had announced their decision to spend €97 million on this computer of mind boggling power, Mr. Ring from the heart of New Zealand, was predicting a very wet day in Roscommon next June, but he reassured his audience that most of the rain would fall during the night hours. How’s that for long term accuracy by just taking a peep at the moon every now and then . . . enough to send any self-respecting meteorologist on a skite of drink!

Anyway it made for very interesting listening, regardless of what store we put on his prediction, as he went through month by month what was ahead of us between now and the end of 2015. In quick summary, Mr. Ring predicted (in early October), that November would generally be wettish and dull with a snow risk in the last three days; the first two weeks of December would continue cold with a snow risk although no White Christmas will follow, but our coldest spell of the year would come after the festive season and into the first three weeks of January.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.