Like politics, everything is local with our weather

Country Living with Francis Farragher

While our Summer couldn’t exactly be described as miserable, it was no great shakes either, and I must confess to feeling a little cheated last week when reading that the world had enjoyed, or endured, (depending on your viewpoint) the hottest July since records began back in the 1880s.

Global is of course not local and given our northern latitude location and the temperature modifying impact of the Atlantic Ocean, it probably was no surprise that we didn’t exactly exhaust our supplies of suntan lotion over the past couple of months.

According to NASA (the National Aeronautics and Space Administration of the United States) our seventh month of the year was 0.11° Celsius warmer than the previous highest temperature of July 2015, with the usual suspects of global warming and El Nino responsible for the hike.

El Nino, which literally translates into Christ child or boy child, is a strange enough phenomenon unconnected with global warming, where the waters of the Eastern Pacific along the north-western coast of South America warm up every seven years or so, due primarily to a change of wind directions.

While global warming is very much of our own making, El Nino was first noticed by Peruvian fishermen back in the 1600s and scientists now reckon that it has been around for thousands of years.

Its current cycle has now petered out although it could be replaced by La Nina, a weather phenomenon caused by the cooling of the waters of the north-western Pacific. After our last 2009 El Nino, we enjoyed a cracking summer in 2010  . . . alas the 2015 version didn’t deliver a similar legacy.

Global trends though often don’t translate into local weather conditions and a glance at some of the 2016 summer weather statistics for Ireland shows the difficulty in weather forecasting due to regional variations.

July was quite dry in the Dublin area with Met Éireann recording just 43.7mms. (less than two inches) for the entire month but at Malin Head, on the northern tip of Donegal, they got a fair dousing, being hit by 109mms. (over 4 inches) of rainfall during the seventh month of the year.

It is hard to generalise about Irish weather as in June, Baldonnel Aerodrome in Dublin had a very wet month with 111.3mms of rain while last April, Dublin Airport had over 88mms. of rainfall, nearly twice as wet as Athenry. So it’s not always a straight east/west divide with the good and the bad weather.

For  more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.