‘17 came in like a lamb before the roar of Ophelia and Brian

OPHELIA was the big weather story of 2017 as the entire country braced in a red-alert lockdown for the post-tropical hurricane barrelling up at us, with Kerry right in the very centre of its crosshairs.

Our position under its eye was to be our saving with the worst of the Ophelia lash hitting Cork and Waterford to the east. Somehow the Kingdom escaped with just minor damage - at least eleven roads closed and over a thousand homes without power due to downed trees.

It was perhaps an earlier storm that was responsible for the limited extent of the damage here. It was Kerry that took the brunt of Storm Darwin on February 12 of 2014; a maelstrom that took out thousands of trees, weeding out the weakest stands long before Ophelia arrived.

Ten months prior to Ophelia and 2017 dawned on the gentlest of notes in the tail end of one of the mildest winters of recent times, one that gave way to a very good spring.

February’s most remarkable weather came in North Kerry on Sunday 5 with an extremely localised hailshower in the Ardfert area that landed some of the largest hailstones ever seen in the county - stones of up to 15mm in diameter.

Despite starting on a poor note and giving us very uninspiring conditions for St Patrick’s weekend, March resulted in one of the finest weekends of the year from the 25th until the 27th.

In April, Liscahane Garden Centre’s Met Éireann station in Ardfert recorded its driest month since August of 2003 - with similarly dry conditions recorded at the Valentia Observatory (51.4mm of rainfall for the month).

May was excellent all told, with Valentia recording it as the sunniest month of the year by far with a total of 53,681 Joules/ cm2 in global solar radiation logged there. This was significantly higher than the next sunniest month at Valentia - June. Global solar radiation at the station that month measured 47,828 Joules/cm2.

We probably knew deep in our waters to have enjoyed May to the hilt in suspicion the summer wouldn’t get any better. It didn’t - with June and July fairly dull and cool and August not much better. That said, the summer was largely dry if not that summery.

Liscahane Garden Centre recorded its wettest month since February of 2016 in September; also the wettest month in Valentia by far for 2017, 204.4mm recorded in South Kerry.

And so it was the weather excitement came with October as Ophelia and Brian hit the county in quick succession - October 16 in the case of Ophelia and October 21 for Brian. The damage was minor, but the alert memorable in Kerry with other parts of the country faring far worse - in a storm that led to at least three fatalities up country.

“One of the more unusual features of the autumn was the number of high pressure systems that yielded very poor weather,” Don Nolan of Liscahane said.

“High pressure systems are, of course, ordinarily associated with good, clear weather but I’ve never known anything like the succession of highs that were cloudy this autumn,” Don added.