Red sky at night IS shepherd’s delight
RTÉ expert offers some fair weather advice and reveals...
FROM burying statues of the Child of Prague to believing the predictions of a Donegal postman, the Irish have what’s best described as a unique relationship with the weather. Yet even this love affair has shape-shifted recently into something closer to obsession. And where once the RTÉ weather presenters were a mere footnote to the daily news agenda, storms, flash floods and wacky weather patterns have seen them edge even closer to the centre of the action.
And this week Irish viewers are being given the chance to get up close and personal with all of it. Presented by Kathryn Thomas, RTÉ One’s Weather Live will be broadcast from the National Botanic Gardens and will feature the nation’s best-loved meteorologists, among them Gerald Fleming, Evelyn Cusack and Joanna Donnelly.
The show promises to sort fact from fiction and enlighten viewers on the whys and wherefores of our notoriously changeable climate.
With the weather moving ever closer into the main news agenda, these meteorologists are becoming ever more recognisable and popular with TV viewers.
LAST month Donnelly became the ‘face of Storm Ophelia’, as she delivered rolling coverage from Dublin’s Met Éireann office in Glasnevin. ‘I’d been working on the night on the Saturday and I saw that this hurricane was set to come and I thought, “uh oh, that’s probably going to be busy”,’ she recalls. ‘I got up and went for a run, and then went into the office into three solid days of the best work I ever did. I worked harder than I’ve ever done before, and I never felt I wanted it to stop. All the time I was aware that there were lives on the line and that it was a very serious situation, but it was very much a career high.’
Of Ireland’s obsession with the weather, Donnelly adds: ‘I think it’s because it happens to all of us outside our control.
‘I’m married to a Dutch man though, and I have to break it to you, the Dutch are obsessed with the weather too.’
Yet there are phenomena that are unique to Ireland’s climate: our four-seasons-in-one-day weather, for a start.
And it turns out there’s a good explanation for that.
‘Our position in the Atlantic Ocean does that to us,’ says Donnelly. ‘The fronts come through Ireland quickly, and we don’t want them hanging around and taking longer to get through, as then it would be raining for days instead of hours. The west of Ireland gets the brunt of these fronts, which is why is seems to rain there more.’
As a meteorologist with some 17 years of experience, Donnelly is more than tickled at the Irish way of predicting weather, and admits that in some cases there is method to the madness.
‘There are two things there, the silly superstitions based on fanground tasy like the Child of Prague, and then the observations of shortterm weather patterns that farmers have used for years and have been passed from generation to generation,’ she says. ‘I won’t dismiss 500 years of experience! Things like “red sky at night”, a sort of short-term forecasting, definitely has its value.’
And there is a science behind ‘red sky at night’ as a predictor of ‘shepherd’s delight’ good weather: ‘The sun going down at night is going to reflect off clouds,’ explains Donnelly. ‘Weather comes from the west as the sun is going down, those clouds are on their way to us. Red clouds in the morning are coming from the opposite direction and will have the opposite effect.’
A couple of decades ago, the weather seemed rather straightforward and predictable. It was warmish in the summer (and, we certainly appeared to have a summer), while winter was dull, cold and wet. Now, things seem entirely different: we get wet non-summers, tempratures of 18C in November and more newsworthy extremes of weather. Has it always been thus?
‘We did have a lot of extreme weather in years past, but we don’t remember them because of Pollyanna syndrome,’ explains Donnelly. ‘We’re more programmed to remember the pleasant rather than the unpleasant things. Also, it probably feels like we had better summers because when we were kids, we had to pay to develop photos, so our mothers probably only took pictures when it was sunny, not of the rainy days we spent in a caravan in Wexford.’
These days however, flash floods, and the chaos they cause, are rarely far from the headlines. A few different factors cause them: ‘Heavy rainfall at the coast will result in coastal surges, meaning that rivers don’t flow outwards, they flow upwards,’ explains the forecaster. ‘This results in flooding in river valleys, and the water tables [the level below which the is saturated with water] becoming very high. Around this time of year, you also find that many drains are blocked with leaves.’
Hurricanes, meanwhile, usually occur when the sea surface temperature goes over 26C. ‘Ophelia formed off the coast of Africa, and was carried by tail winds to the Caribbean,’ says Donnelly. ‘Usually, they lose their energy when they move to the cooler oceans of the North Atlantic, but this one got diverted by the upper air.
‘The winds in the upper atmosphere run in different directions than at the surface, and the winds in the upper atmosphere were going the wrong way, basically.’
When it comes to naming storms and hurricanes, the Irish and British Meteorological offices collaborate and pick from a pool of names previously suggested by the public. As they move through the alphabet, the storms alternate between male and female names.
‘The naming started a few years ago and when the media started naming some storms themselves, like Storm Darwin in 2014, it resulted in plenty of confusion,’ smiles Donnelly. ‘But we usually get together with the UK office and we both name the storms once the warning levels reach Orange [critical] status.’
CLIMATE change has brought more variability in weather extremes, which will likely result in more storms: ‘The general agreement is that the extremes will become more extreme [in the next 50 years],’ says Donnelly. ‘Cold winters will be colder, warm summers will be hotter and extreme events may happen more regularly.’ Still, Donnelly notes, the likes of Ophelia (which originated as a hurricane but got downgraded to a storm by the time it hit Ireland) is not likely to become a regular occurrence in Ireland.
‘The events that caused the hurricane to happen were a unique chain of events. It happened before with Debbie in 1961, but the things that would have to be in place for a hurricane to arrive in Irish shores is unique; all those parameters would have to line up the same way again.’
Despite overwhelming scientific evidence, many people still don’t ‘believe’ in climate change. According to research, more than half of America’s 115th Congress are climate change deniers.
‘It’s not Santa Claus, or a ghost,’ notes Donnelly. ‘It’s not something you get to choose to believe in. The scientific fact is there – it’s not a matter of opinion. Some people certainly question whether man is the cause of climate change, but the general consensus is that the odds are stacked very much against that.’
Joanna Donnelly appears on Weather Live, broadcast as part of Science Week tomorrow, Thursday and Friday at 7pm on RTÉ One.