How to Survive Winter

It’s been cold, properly wintery cold, since about the 18th of December. It’s being touted as the coldest spell in Ireland for the last 50 years, and while there haven’t been completely record-breaking low temperatures, numbers around the -9°C mark have been recorded. I’ll also point out for my North European and North American readers that our humidity hovers around the 90% mark, so it feels colder than those numbers would indicate.

My own electronic thermometer recorded a low of -4.7°C on Christmas Morning, and it has since hit -4.5°C on the morning of the 2nd of January. It was -2.6°C when we were leaving the house yesterday morning. The Royal Canal has had ice on it pretty consistently since the 23rd of December, and nearly all precipitation has been as snow or ice pellets, with some occasional sleet to liven things up. Mostly, it’s been dry.

The weather forecasts on some services are reading like science fiction (Kim Stanley Robinson, to be precise). Metcheck is predicting -8°C during the morning of Saturday 8th January, and indeed, -10°C on the following Monday morning. These dates are more than three days out, and as such are unreliable, but it’s a fair indicator that it will continue to be cold.

Metcheck also says that there will be snow in my area by tomorrow morning, or at least, tomorrow afternoon. Sometime, anyway.

yr.no, a service less given to histrionics than Metcheck, agrees that there will be snow in Kildare by tomorrow morning. It doesn’t extend to the early days of next week, but predicts a much more likely -4°C for Saturday. It’s hard to remember, somtimes, though, that it’s just using a different model or ensemble of models, and isn’t inherently more reliable - it underestimated the cold on the morning of January 2nd by quite a long shot, for instance.

Neither of the services is predicting much above 3°C for the foreseeable future, though. For a country where that’s the average minimum for January, that’s quite notable.