How to Survive Winter

Last year, we had the first frost on the 27th of October (and here’s a fantastic frost photograph by Wojciech Szczygieł, taken near Courtown in Co. Wexford).

Average first frost dates are hard to find online, but the general feeling seems to be that up until the mid-nineties, first frosts happened in late September. These days, as evidenced above, they don’t happen until late October, and sometimes early November. However, last winter set into being fairly cold following the late start.

The lowest temperatures in Ireland - including the record of -19.1°C in 1881, at the rather stunning Markree Castle, which is well-equipped for winter weather - have always happened in January, according to Met Eireann. So it’s pretty unlikely that we’re going to get a drop to sudden very cold temperatures. Nevertheless, the possibility of an early frost, in comparison to the last decade at least, is out there - there are predictions of temperatures of 4°C for the end of September already. So watch those tomatoes!

The Metcheck site has a weather warning up - high winds, up to storm force, from an Atlantic low, affecting Western and Northern Scotland, and to a lesser degree the West of Ireland and Southern Scotland. They say:

“Southwesterly gales are expected to quickly develop on Tuesday morning across northern and western Scotland, becoming severe across the far northwest with gusts of up to 80MPH likely. These severe gales will then affect the Northern Isles later on Tuesday, before gradually easing down by Wednesday morning. Winds of this strength may cause structural damage and branches to come down from trees.”

It looks like that stormy autumn is getting off to a vigourous start. In the rest of Ireland and the Midlands of the UK, it’s likely just to be raining and windy - nothing like the actual storm in the North.

Two of the long-range forecasts have now appeared.

Weather Online has a forecast up for the full winter, and say an “emphasis seems to be on cooler conditions with February possibly being very cold.”

The Weather Outlook has an autumn forecast up, and they reckon it’s going to be a bit stormier than usual (we’ve seen some of that already, really, with the remnants of Hurricane Bill and Tropical Storm Danny both pulling over the British Isles in the last short while).

More as they appear…

I was fully intending to leave re-opening How to Survive Winter until at least the 1st of September. But I just came in from fetching lunch, there’s a chill (and a stiff breeze) in the air, there were chestnuts fallen from a tree, and a sycamore leaf drifted down in front of me just before I came back in to the office. So I’m opening up for business again.

Observations that autumn is here seem to have cut in right across the Northern Hemisphere; my twitter feed (@gothwalk) is full of people observing overnight drops in temperature, falling leaves, and in the British Isles, the unusually early crop of blackberries, haws, and chestnuts.

This year, I have more of a garden to keep an eye on, so the first frost date is going to be of interest. Indeed, the last frost date will also be of interest, but that’s harder to spot, and many months away yet in any case. I also have plans to get in a good stash of firewood.

Official predictions for Winter 2009/2010 are not out yet from any sources. I’m offering my own predictions, though - these are based on guesswork and instinct, so don’t mistake them for anything authoritative!

I reckon the early autumn is going to have more storms than in the last few years, with at least one big one coming through in late September or early October. Things will then quiet down into a drier-than-average, colder-than-average winter. There will be light frosts from mid-October on, and heavy frosts through December and January, but probably little enough actual snow.

I’ll check back in February, and see how that guess holds up. I’ll also update here as soon as any more educated forecasts hit the web.

It’s now May, and while winter persisted, with a late frost in the end of April, I think we can say it’s done now. So How to Survive Winter is entering estivation (like hibernation, except for the summer!). See you next winter!

The media has been full of snow. Yesterday’s fall brought London, and much of the South of England, to a complete halt, but we didn’t get all that much here. Looking at the forecasts, though, I arranged to work from home today. As it turned out, the morning was cold, and traffic around here was bad, but a lot of the snowfall overnight had melted, and even with snow on and off through the day, none of it was sticking. That all changed in the late afternoon, though, as a heavy shower swept in, and turned the world white in minutes. I’ve never seen snow like that in Ireland before; even though the ground was damp, it’s now coated a centimetre or two thick in white, and there’s more snow forecast overnight and during tomorrow morning. I’ll be trying to get into Dublin for work, so I’ll be paying close attention to the traffic reports and other bits of news - assuming it doesn’t all vanish again, of course!

Apparently, it’s so long since we’ve had snow of any measure in Ireland that RTÉ, the national broadcaster, has felt it necessary to put up a guide on “surviving and enjoying our snow“. The mind boggles.

As I write (at 02:10 in the morning - mild insomnia), it’s starting to snow here in Ireland, and the UK has already had it for some hours. There is, of course, plenty of media coverage all over. We’re unlikely to see more than a scattering here, I think, although it’s likely to cause chaos all the same. The news stories from the Uk are varying from ‘heaviest snow in 6 years’ to ‘heaviest snow in decades’, but the reality is, we haven’t seen much for years, and certainly in Ireland, we’ve nearly no memory of how to handle it.

I was talking to a taxi-driver in Cork recently. Apparently, due to annual family holidays in January, his 21-year-old son has never seen snow.

The weather forecasts are predicting snow - possibly quite heavy snow - in early February in the UK, and in the eastern half of Ireland. It’s reckoned that this will hit Monday’s work commute in the UK fairly hard, and Motorists are being warned to bring warm clothes in case they get stuck. We’d recommend also bringing some food, and ideally, a flask of something hot if you’re driving outside towns, particularly if you’re not used to driving in snow, or if your car isn’t suitable for it. Make sure your mobile phone is well-charged as well!

I’ve seen a lot more people wearing hats this winter than I have in years. As I’ve mentioned on the winter clothing section, hats are a pretty good way to keep warm, but I’m noticing an added benefit in today’s cold drizzling rain - a broad-brimmed hat seems to work better than an umbrella for keeping the rain off. Now, obviously, it’s only keeping the water off your head, rather than your whole body, but on the other hand, it does that very well, and you can wear a coat over most of the rest of you. Umbrellas are much more inconvenient - they occupy one of your hands at all times, keep the driest space up over your head where it’s no use, and in the windy climate of Ireland and the UK, they very often end up inside out and broken.

Fashions change too, of course, and I’ll be interested to see if the broad-brimmed hat comes back in over the next few years.