How to Survive Winter

Peter O’Donnell has released his Irish Winter Forecast for 2010/2011. O’Donnell is one of the most accurate forecasters out there, and his predictions for last year’s early winter weather were right on the money, so I’m inclined to pay more heed to this than to most.

To summarise, he reckons that there’ll be a good amount of variation in the weather through the winter. November will be slightly colder than average, though nothing like as bad as last year. December will probably be about average, but January will be at least 2°C colder than usual, possibly even 4°C colder, with a distinct possibility of major snow events toward the end of the month. February will be quite mild, and then March colder again.

This is more in line than last winter with the “traditional” pattern, particularly the relatively mild weather in December, followed by cold and snow in January. We’ll see how it plays out – O’Donnell will update as more data becomes available, and I’ll be keeping a close eye on his forecasts.

The mountains in Svalbard have a light coating of snow today, and snow at sea level is expected there over the weekend. Svalbard is one of the earliest coastal locations in the Northern Hemisphere to see snow every year, and weather watchers keep an eye on it for that – not because it’s a clear indicator of anything else, but simply to see the “first snow” of winter.

The image above is from a webcam in Longyearbyen, and you can see the snow across the water.

In addition, there’s a report from the BBC that Heathrow Airport has tripled its snow clearance fleet, which is an interesting investment, and shows they’re taking the possibility of heavy snow seriously this year.

It all seems a little strange in the late September heatwave here, where some Irish and UK weather stations recorded the hottest day of the year yesterday.

There were problems all over Ireland and the UK last winter with frozen water pipes. In response, people left taps running overnight – or even all the time when the weather was really cold. This is, unless you have your own well, pretty much exactly the wrong thing to do. Sure, it keeps your water running, but it can contribute to draining reservoirs at a time when there’s not much water going back into them, and the various water authorities respond to this (and to mains pipes freezing and cracking) by turning the supply off. That doesn’t help anyone. So if your pipes tend to freeze, what should you do?

Well, first and foremost, if your pipes froze last year, you can do things to prevent this. It’s possible that your water supply pipes are too close to the surface, for a start. Mains water usually runs at about 45cm down, or further, but the pipe from the supply to the house may run considerably closer to the surface. Ours, for instance, ran fairly deep for most of the way, but came up to only about 8cm below the surface just before it came into the house – this was discovered when we had a new porch put in this autumn, when the ground was dug up. It explains a lot about our water supply last winter, too. It should be considerably better this year, since it’s now buried under the porch.

If you can’t rebury the pipe deeper, you may still be able to insulate it, and this is also true of pipes that come above the surface before going through a wall. Indeed, it’s often worthwhile to insulate pipes even inside the house.

Failing that, your next thing is to store water. This requires some preparation, or alternately, keeping a close eye on the weather forecast. You can store water in the long term, but it requires adding a drop of bleach to make sure it stays clear and clean, and I’ve never been too keen on the idea. I find it much easier to keep an eye on the forecasts, and to fill the bath and a few buckets or other containers when there’s a cold snap coming up. You can then take care of essentials like cooking, toilet flushing, and so on, from that. Obviously, in a long cold period, this isn’t as useful, but it can work perfectly well over the shorter snaps.

For longer periods, there are a number of coping strategies, but they largely come down to getting your water elsewhere. The most essential thing is toilet flushing, so prioritise it, but note that you can use “grey water” – water left after cooking, washing up, etc – for that. Melted snow and ice can provide more – go for ice, if you can, since snow is not dense, and a bucket of snow will only produce about 10% of the volume in water. Local councils will often send out water tankers as well, and you can bring along buckets and containers and get them filled. It’s also rare enough for everywhere in a given area to be cut off at once, so you may be able to shower and wash clothes at a neighbour’s house. During the worst of the cold snaps last year, some hotels were also offering washing services for small prices – you get the use of an en-suite room for an hour or so. And if you have a gym membership, it’s a good time to take advantage of their facilities, even if you don’t otherwise use them.

When it comes down to it, running water is a modern invention, and people got along without it for a long time. It’s inconvenient, but it’s by no means impossible to deal with it.

My records indicate that we had the first frost in 2008 on the 27th of October,  2009 on the 7th of October, and in 2010 on the 17th of October. I’ve been keeping a close eye on predictions for this year, and I believe it’ll be mid-October again.  Now, bear in mind there that that’s a semi-urban area, altitude only about 70m, not too distant from Dublin, so there could well be earlier frosts further north or west, or higher up.

Nights are already getting a little cooler, and there have been some dips as low as 8°C. However, it’ll take slightly longer nights before things really cool enough for frost, and the equinox is not quite here yet – tomorrow morning.

I might as well make a prediction while I’m here, so I’m going to go for the 16th of October for the first frost this year. There are fairly broad expectations from many forecasters for a cold snap around the end of October and the beginning of November; I’m a bit skeptical about it being that early, but we’ll see.