Conchita and firenados made for an unusual weather week

Country Living with Francis Farragher

We do love to moan about the weather and we always convince ourselves that we have a good case. It’s either too wet, too cold, too frosty, too windy or too foggy but my old friend, the late Frank Gaffney (an absolute treasure of weather information and data) used often remind me that really here in Ireland we ‘didn’t even know’ what extremes of weather were. And how right he was.

Over the course of May, which in general terms has been a pretty cool, dull and wettish month, we were inclined to feel a bit sorry for ourselves but really we had only very minor troubles as compared to the calamitous rainfall that descended on the Balkans or Yugoslavia as we used to call it in the days of communism.

During the course of three days in mid-May, they received as much rainfall in this region as they would normally get in three months, as an area of low pressure got locked over the Balkans, essentially being ring-fenced in by blocking areas of high pressure.

Here in Ireland we all love to hear of what are known as ‘blocking highs’, essentially huge blobs of stable dry air than can lodge over an area for days and sometimes weeks at a time. If we get one of those centred over us during July and August, it delivers the treat of a summer heatwave, but at times they can result in an area of low pressure ‘staying put’ over a land mass.

In our case, the usual example of this would be an area of high pressure with its fringe lying along the western coast of the UK and preventing the natural movement of low pressure systems from west to east. If the low pressure cannot go anywhere, then it drops its load in the one place. In the case of the Balkans weather disaster, the low was also being constantly refuelled with rain filled swirls from the Mediterranean, so it really was a case of  all the elements being in place for the perfect storm.

Sometimes though out of incredible adversity good can come, and apparently there were various examples of support and camaraderie between Balkan states that 20 years previously had been trying to wipe each other out in a savage war. However, as the Tayto ad goes, ‘there’s always one’ and according to the Guardian newspaper last week, the Serbian Orthodox Church decided not to miss the opportunity of the flood disaster to launch an unholy attack on the lesbian and gay communities.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.