How to Survive Winter

There’s an interesting item on the Guardian website about winter clothing. I’ve been experimenting with suitable clothes for various weather myself, over and above my own advice on clothing, and I’m coming to the conclusion that if there’s anything falling from the sky, a hat with a brim is essential. I’ve tried hoods, woolen hats, and umbrellas, and none of them do the trick the same way.

Hoods limit your range of vision, which can be annoying in some circumstances, and downright dangerous if you’re crossing a road. The brimless woolly hat keeps your head warm, and the top of it dry, certainly, but doesn’t keep the rain out of your face. And the umbrella, while admirable for keeping off rain in calm conditions, ties up one hand all the time. And when do we get rain in calm conditions in these islands?

The next trick, of course, once you have the hat, is not to lose it. I’ve had one stolen – or possibly taken by accident, from a luggage rack on a train – but never quite lost one. There’ve been a number of near misses, though as I dash back into a train carriage or back up the stairs on a bus to grab it. I’ve taken to keeping it on my lap now, which makes it rather harder to leave behind.

We had the first frost in my area of Ireland on the morning of Sunday 17th October. It wasn’t just a ground frost – the air temperature dropped just below freezing, very briefly, around 07:00. Nina and I were up at 08:00 to go for a walk in the frost and mist along the canal, and it was absolutely glorious. There was only a breath of wind, just enough to push the mist on the canal eastward at about walking pace, and once we were away from the village, we were seeing heavy frost outlining leaves and grass. It all cleared as soon as the sun rose, of course, and even by 10:00, it was just a cool autumn morning with cloud coming in from the west.

Tomorrow morning looks like being a frost that more people will see; reliable weather forecasts are predicting temperatures down to freezing, and I suspect that rural areas will go well below zero. This isn’t unusual for mid-October, although the continued dry weather is!

It looks like there could be a wintry end to October. The daytime temperature around where I live took a drop to around the 10°C mark in mid-September, and hasn’t really moved a whole lot since – we’ve had some cold-ish nights, down to 5.5°C or so, and it’s been back up as far as about 17°C. There hasn’t been a real frost yet, only the vaguest hint of one on the coldest night so far. It’s also been quite dry – my electronic rain gauge has only recorded 1.5mm of rain in the last 12 days.

However, the Telegraph now have an article up about snow hitting the UK in the end of October. I’ve been watching some of these charts, and I’m sceptical – there’s probably going to be some cold weather, possibly even some frosts, but I’ll be rather surprised if there are sub-zero temperatures in the southern UK or in Ireland. It’s probably time to get the last of the tomatoes in, though, if you’re growing any outdoors.

There are some long-range weather forecasts in that article as well. Treat these with a pinch of salt – while there are some indications of a cold winter this year, any claims about clustering, or that a given phenomenon elsewhere in the world means a cold winter here, are not reliable. Weather is a chaotic system. Chances are fair to good for a cold winter with snow, but there’s still every possibility of a mild one.

That said, we’re going to be ordering firewood in quantity in early November, and I reckon we’ll be glad of the new double-glazing…

It’s a little early in the year to be waking up the Winter Blog, but I spotted an article this morning, and reckoned it was too relevant to pass. The headline is: More Cold and Snowy Winters to Come in Europe, Eastern Asia and Eastern North America, and here’s the most relevant quote:

“While the emerging impact of greenhouse gases is an important factor in the changing Arctic, what was not fully recognised until now is that a combination of an unusual warm period due to natural variability, loss of sea ice reflectivity, ocean heat storage and changing wind patterns working together has disrupted the memory and stability of the Arctic climate system, resulting in greater ice loss than earlier climate models predicted,” says Dr Overland.

“The exceptional cold and snowy winter of 2009-2010 in Europe, eastern Asia and eastern North America is connected to unique physical processes in the Arctic,” he says.

This is, of course, terribly reminiscent of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Fifty Degrees Below, one of the books which provoked me to start this website.

The winter is having one final run at us this week, with what’s potentially a nasty enough storm sweeping down through the Irish Sea, or perhaps along the east coast of Ireland. For once, this looks set to have more influence on Irish weather than that of the UK. Forecasts vary on the exact precipitation; some services are predicting up to 10cm of snow in places, while others predict nothing more than heavy sleet. The whole will be accompanied by strong northerly winds, though, and if it does start to snow, conditions tonight could be unpleasant. It doesn’t look as though there will be sustained cold temperatures, though, so if, like me, you’ve started the spring plantings in the garden, you should be safe enough.

It seems that the winter is not over yet – there’s another cold snap coming in across the British Isles as I write. The Guardian cover the predictions in some detail, but the general gist is that it’s not likely to be as deeply cold as the January cold. There’ll be some snow across the UK, and maybe in the eastern edges of Ireland.

Of course, it’s worth bearing in mind that some of the longest spells of lying snow, and some of the deepest snows recorded in the Isles, have fallen in February. The snow that fell in February 1947 lasted more than a month in Ireland.

As the cold gets stuck in – and some weather models are saying it could stay for weeks more – here’s a helpful (if slightly tongue-in-cheek) set of frequently asked questions for dealing with snow, from the Guardian.

For those in parts of the UK affected by snow, with public transport out of action or badly delayed in many areas, cycling may actually be a workable way to get around. Matt Seaton, writing in the Guardian, has a timely article on cycling in snow. Be careful out there!

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.

The 13th of December is still more than three days out, and therefore weather predictions are not reliable. However, most of the forecasts models seem to agree that the UK and Ireland will see some fairly cold, clear weather starting from next week, and lasting for at least a few days – temperatures dipping below freezing overnight, and not rising much past 4°C during daylight.

Some of the weather discussion boards are hoping for snow in Ireland during this period. Much as I’d like to agree, I don’t think we’ll see snow this side of January, but we’ll certainly see some hard frosts. Weather should remain fairly clear in and around these temperatures, so ice on roads shouldn’t be a major problem – but frost itself can be dangerous enough, so be careful with travel for Christmas.