The wind meandering at high altitude over Ireland is also giving the US a disastrous summer, writes DICK AHLSTROM,Science Editor
“Now is the summer of our discontent, made sodden winter by this missing sun.”
So William Shakespeare might write today – about the summer that wasn’t, 2012. Nor is there an end in sight for the unsettled, humid, rainy conditions that have typified the past three months.
Yesterday the east and south in particular were buffeted by what Met Éireann described as being more like a full-blown winter storm than a summer rain shower. And despite a more or less dry start this morning, later in the day the forecasters predict more precipitation to add to the brimming rain gauges.
“There is no sign of it settling down,” a Met Éireann forecaster said yesterday. “The trend is for mild but unsettled conditions with dry periods but also very wet from time to time.”
As of this week we are running at about 150 per cent to 200 per cent of typical summer rainfall for the summer season, which runs from June to the end of August, said Séamus Walsh, senior climatologist at Met Éireann.
Average temperatures have also been between a half and one degree cooler than the 30-year summertime average, he added. So if your abiding memory of summer 2012 is of cool, damp conditions, your memory serves correctly.
There is a known villain of the piece, an unco-operative jet stream. Like a conveyor belt it has deposited unsettled weather over northern Europe but at the same time has brought blinding sun and heat waves to the continental US, said Peter Lynch, professor of meteorology in the School of Mathematical Sciences at University College Dublin.
The jet stream is like a high- altitude river of wind that flows along the point of contact between cool air from the Arctic and warm air pushing up from the tropics, he said.
It meanders as it flows, sometimes drifting south of us to pull in unsettled, cool conditions, and other times moving north of us, dragging with it stable, warm air and sunshine.
Usually it acts in a more fair-minded way, sharing out more balanced portions of summertime weather, but for some reason it has locked, keeping us under clouds and the US trapped in drought.
The US is experiencing its worst drought for 56 years, with crops shrivelling in the fields and food commodity prices rocketing.
Yet farmers on this side of the Atlantic are struggling too, Irish Farmers’ Association president John Bryan said yesterday. “Weather-related problems are building up,” he said.
“The ground is so saturated that many farmers have been forced to rehouse livestock,
which results in farmers having to buy in extra feed.” In a cruel irony, feed prices are rising to an all-time high because of drought-related yield losses in the US and Russia.
We can probably expect records to fall at some Met stations around the country by the end of the month but at this stage it hardly matters. The new school year, when it starts, will knock the last bit of summer out of us and make us all start to hunker down for the long winter ahead.