A correspondent reminded me the other day of an old saying:
When the wind's in the east on
Candlemas Day
It'll stay that way til the end of
May.
"I think your records will show," he went on, "that there was already a well established pattern of easterly "winds at that time this year - and now we see the result!"
When I checked, I found he was absolutely right. During the second half of January 1996, an anticyclone to the north brought us cold north easterly winds from the Continent. The pattern continued during the early days of February, and what is more, Candlemas Day, was dry and sunny - a notoriously bad sign:
A hind had as lief see his wife on the bier,
As that Candlemas Day should be pleasant and clear.
Obviously all the signs were there, so perhaps we should not be surprised that spring has been unusually chilly. Average temperatures for February and March were almost a degree below normal levels for those months; April was unremarkable, but May, so far, has been exceptionally cold. Already in Britain they are talking about it being the coldest May since 1659: here in Ireland our statistics are less dramatic but if there is no improvement it will turn out to have been our coldest May in many places since records began more than 100 years ago.
As my correspondent pointed out, the easterly winds are to blame. The normal springtime weather pattern in these parts might comprise a low pressure area near Iceland, high pressure over the Azores, and a westerly flow of air in between bringing mild air and a regular succession of rainbelts in from the Atlantic. Now and then this pattern might invert itself - an anticyclone over Scandinavia, low pressure in the Bay of Biscay and easterly winds developing to bring cold air from still frozen continental Europe over Ireland. The problem this year has been that this second pattern, rather than being an occasional anomaly, has tended to become the norm - and we have felt the consequences.
When the weather behaves oddly nowadays, people immediately think of climate change, global warming and the ozone layer. But we cannot realistically blame our chilly spring on human interference with the atmospheric chemistry: while the pressure patterns have been somewhat unusual, they are not abnormal, and might be expected to occur now and then as part of the normal variability of North Atlantic weather. There have been cold springs before, and there will be again: the only inference is the obvious one:
When the wind is in the east
Tis neither good for man nor beast.