September had its early and late saving graces

Country Living with Francis Farragher

We tend to have a certain fondness for September in Ireland given the fact that in years of bad summers our nine month of the year has often saved the day, and occasionally saved the hay too, with a benign spell of weather.

I’m not too sure if all of this could be solidly based on meteorological data, but again this year, September delivered two very dry spells of weather, split evenly in nine day segments at the start and end of the month.

We enjoyed periods of zero rainfall from September 1 through to the 9th while the last nine days of the month were also completely dry, with that latter rainless period extending into the first four days of October.

The ‘bit in the middle’ though wasn’t quite as gracious, with some seriously heavy pulses of rainfall from the Friday of September 11 on through to the Tuesday morning of September 15. Quite an incredible rainfall amount was recorded in the Shanbolard area near Cleggan in a 24 hour period starting on the Sunday morning of September 13, when 125mms. or almost five inches, of rain fell on the area.

This really was rainfall of monsoon or equatorial proportions and sadly it took its toll in terms of human life in West Mayo, with retired Anglican Minister, Roger Grainger, drowning when his car was swept into a flooded ditch on Achill Sunday that Sunday night.

That wickedly wet spell from the Friday morning of September 11 to the following Tuesday extended to all parts of the region but parts of Connemara and the West Coast seemed to have been caught in a rain loop as a frontal depression just hung over them for a 24 hour period.

Abbeyknockmoy weather recorder, Brendan Geraghty, said he had zero rainfall from September 1 through to the 9th and a similarly completely dry spell from the 22nd day of the month through to last Sunday night, October 4. His rainfall total for the month at his mid-Galway location came to 3.47 inches or 88.1mms., a bit below the average for the month over the past 20 or 30 years, but not nearly as dry as the Septembers of 2014 (1.1 inches) and 2013 (1.99 inches).

“I suppose that there was a great chance at the start of the month and at the end of it, allowing farmers to ‘get the harvest and to get the bog tidied up’, although the drying was poor enough over the last week or so of September, due to the morning fogs and very little by way of a breeze,” said Brendan Geraghty.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.