AS I SEE IT
BY MARIANNE HERON
If you want to see sectarianism in action look no further than the 35 Orangemen who want to march the Garvaghy Road in Portadown and the Republican residents who oppose them. It’s an insidious ‘them and us’ division
If there is one thing we like to grumble about — politicians aside — it’s the weather. Too much rain or too little, rain and wind that fail to live up to their yellow, orange or red warnings or surpass them, there’s no end to it, especially recently with more extreme weather events. And forecasters come in for stick too for not getting it right, or right in our own particular locality.
After an evening listening to two experts recently, I have got a lot more respect for what is actually involved in the science of forecasting. “Before you can forecast you need to know what is happening with the weather everywhere in the world,” says Evelyn Cusack, the face of Irish weather for Met Éireann’s forecasts for TV and radio for 30 years and later head of their forecasting division.
At the start of her career in the 1980s, the tools of the trade were pencils and hand-drawn charts, and weather (the state of our atmosphere) was forecast for just a day ahead. Now the science of meteorology has got a bit more complicated, with observations from weather satellites as game changers and computers capable of making trillions of calculations per second to interpret all the information as meteorological models in mathematical language. This information comes from more than 10,000 weather stations on land around the world and different sources from ships to rainfall radars.
Weather models are based on thousands of divisions of the atmosphere into cubes around the world, with forecasts for rain, wind and temperature for now three to 15 days ahead, depending on whether it’s a local or a global model. Then it’s up to the human element, with forecasters using their local knowledge, experience and atmospheric physics to communicate what is likely to happen, which is now available on handy apps on our phones.
“It helps if we look out of the window though,” laughs Evelyn.
We do the same and interpret the signs we see, sometimes with folklore, but how reliable are these traditions? Evelyn and her colleague Seamus Walsh, who went on from forecasting to research and then as head of Climate Observations for Met Éireann, dismiss some beliefs. How about the one where loads of berries in the autumn are meant to predict a hard winter? Wrong, plentiful berries are due to plants having a favourable spring. The one about swallows flying high being a sign of good weather is true. In good weather, warm air rises and so do the flies, with swallows in pursuit.
Back to the future: what about the effect of the super El Niño on Ireland? We will have a warmer, wetter winter, predicts Evelyn, while Seamus comments that there will be more energy around to create storms. The colleagues have co-authored a fascinating book, They Say It Might Rain, on the highs and lows of Ireland’s weather and climate.
The concept of climate change can be hard to grasp, but a graph in their book shows how Ireland’s annual temperature from 1900 to 2024 differs from the 1961 to 1990 long-term average. The graph reads from 1900 on the left, with cooler years shown in blue stripes and hotter ones in red. Nearly all the blue stripes are on the left, and the red — getting taller and taller, especially since 2000 — are on the right.
It’s dramatic and scary, illustrating how our own climate is part of the bigger picture of global warming due to the increase in greenhouse gases, especially from burning fossil fuels.
Our atmosphere is a protective skin, as thin as the skin of an apple is to the rest of the fruit, and we are damaging it with our behaviour. The troposphere, the lowest layer of atmosphere where weather occurs above us in Ireland, is just 10km deep. The average annual carbon footprint per individual is 10.2 tonnes of CO2, the second highest in the EU and 51% more than the EU average.
There are plenty of things we can do individually, from using public transport to installing solar panels, to avoid reaching a tipping point where changes, like the loss of the North Atlantic current making Ireland much colder, become irreversible.
Forecasters predict what happens to our climate, but we are all contributing to its future.
