‘Steady as she goes’ while Winter slips by

Country Living with Francis Farragher

We’ve been chugging along so merrily through a mild and dry Winter, that our forecasters have been pining for something to give out warnings about. This time last year, we had endured a whole run of storms cum deluges, but 12 months later, our rivers are running at very modest levels, while Angus, Barbara and Conor (our three official storms of this season) all very obligingly sidestepped our shores.

There was a bit of a tizzy last week about our ‘cold snap’ that was reputedly arriving on Thursday and Friday, but overall it was a pretty harmless affair, with just a few small flurries of snow on Thursday followed by a quite benign weekend.

Last week, a colleague of mine asked me whether I was doing a weather story about the arctic days that were in store for us, but two cold Galway days in mid-January is not exactly the stuff to set the alarm bells ringing in the Reuters news agency.

Met Éireann, like most of the other major forecasters, probably do tend to err on the side of caution, when it comes to weather warnings and for pretty obvious reasons too. A weather alert that doesn’t turn out as bad as predicted is no problem, but turn that the other way around, and the consequences can be pretty catastrophic.

The BBC and the UK Met. Office have tended over the years to have suffered their fair share of ignominy about getting weather forecasts wrong, and while we all joke, jibe and gossip about all things weather, the accuracy of the predictions can be a matter of life and death for some people.

While Michael Fish’s infamous weather forecast in1987, is now reflected on with humour more so than malice, the storm, he said that wouldn’t come, left a trail of destruction across the south of England and claimed 19 lives. So, while many of us follow weather as a hobby and as a great elixir when any conversation is in need of revival, the forecasts are a very serious business for anyone caught out in the great outdoors.

It wasn’t quite as serious for the BBC in April, 2009, when they confidently predicted a barbecue summer to be on the way, and it subsequently never stopped raining through the holiday period. Even at that, there were thousands of Brits who reputedly opted to holiday at home on the strength of that forecast – but at least it didn’t cost them their lives.

We’ve been spoiled this Winter with October, November, December, and January so far, all being relatively dry months, while for the most part, we avoided any extremes in terms of frost or snow.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.