Meeting a man who’s lost faith in ‘the Ring forecasts’

Country Living with Francis Farragher

Last week, while buying some provisions in the local store, I was confronted (well in a nice kind of way) by a fellow customer, who had taken my advice in early March, to monitor the forecast accuracy of our New Zealand friend, Ken Ring, probably the world’s most famous long term predictor of weather.

The New Zealander does have an avid fan club but if you take a trawl through social media, he has his critics too, many of whom also give the conventional media a bit of stick too, for not highlighting his failures as well as his successes.

We do all do tend to get sucked into a place where predictions into the future are made and each Autumn, Ken Ring produces his almanac predicting weather conditions for the year ahead, at its furthest point about 14 to 15 months in advance.

He does have his ‘jackpot strikes’ as was the case last year when he predicted that our best spell of summer weather would arrive around the end of May and early June. Lo and behold, it turned out to be our only really decent window of high pressure through the whole Summer . . . but alas the tale has been a different one this Spring.

My friend in the provisions’ store had obviously taken my advice last March to cut out my column on Ken Ring’s predictions for the rest of 2017 and observed that he was ‘a long way off the mark’ on his forecast for the Spring gone by and especially the month of April.

As has been well recorded, our April gone by tended to smash the record books in terms of low rainfall amounts. Abbeyknockmoy weather recorder, Brendan Geraghty, whose statistics date back to 1941, had no other April with such miserly rain figures as we had last month. His rainfall figure for April, 2017, of less than a third of one inch (just over 8mms), was mirrored in the official Met. Éireann figures from all over the country.

Ken Ring’s prediction for April, taken directly from his almanac, is as follows: “Wetter overall with an estimated 40% more rainfall than is typical for April. Ulster can expect around 45% more rainfall than the norm; Connacht will be around 20%/25% wetter; Leinster close to 10% wetter and Munster, 70%/75% wetter than normal . . .

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.