How to Survive Winter

There’s a report on Space Daily back in June that I’ve only just come across. It’s about a major drop in solar activity predicted between now and 2022 – essentially, a lack of sunspots. There haven’t been many sunspots for some time now, and even though there are a few there at the moment, there’s nothing like the number that there should be at this point in the Sun’s cycle.

Low solar activity has been connected with hard winters in history – the Maunder and Dalton minima being the notable ones. There’s some speculation as to what effects this could have on Popsci: Coming Solar Minimum Could Chill the Earth, New Forecast Predicts. Everyone’s being very careful to point out that this wouldn’t be much of a counter to human effects on climate, but something it could do is open up possibilities of colder winters, or spots of deeper cold within winters that hew close to climatic averages otherwise.

One to keep an eye on, over the next decade or so.

Bob Vila has provided an excellent bi-annual checklist to be carried out on housing in autumn and spring. It deals more with detached housing than semi-detached or terraced housing, but it’s a good basis to develop your own checklist from. It’s also one that’s worth looking at even if you’re renting, as you may need to let your landlord know in advance of potential problems.

Professor Trevor Harley has compiled an excellent set of historical data on extreme weather events, including month by month accounts. We’re interested in October, November, December, January and February.

He also has a page on when the first frosts can be expected, concluding an average of the 5th of October. In cities, I suspect that’s a bit later; we’ve rarely seen frost in Dublin in the last few years until November.

There’s a fascinating set of pages on the BBC site: The Year So Far. It details averages and means in temperature, rainfall, etc, and how the current year is behaving. Well worth keeping an eye on, I think.

Also from the BBC is a page concerning that most typical of winter weather in these islands: Rain, Drizzle & Fog.

Finally, since I read it with great pleasure a few years ago, I thought I’d provide a link to Eddie Graham’s A Dublin Weather Diary. It’s probably of interest to meteorology geeks more than anyone else, but it details things like the usual dates of the first air frost, the coldest days of the year, and other hard to find information. It was published in 2000, so it probably won’t be completely accurate for the warmer, wetter weather we’ve had since, but it provides a good context.

Metcheck, my favourite weather-prediction site, have just put up their winter coverage pages. Of particular interest are the FrostRisk and SnowRisk pages, and their RainRisk page is up year-round.

Metcheck’s service is pretty accurate, especially for the next three to four days, and I keep their “Today” forecast open in a browser tab pretty much all the time.

Various winter food sites today:

The UK Food Standards Agency have recommendations for food in winter.
A retrospective on a radio series broadcast by the Irish national channel, RTÉ: Winter Food.

And Nigel Slater, writing in the Observer, gives us some fine winter recipes.