Meteorologists are, of course, scientists and this is presumably what enables them to calmly use phrases like "a little unseasonal", when the rest of us are standing at the bus stop, outraged, drenched through, watching wheelie bins flying through the air.
As the merry, merry month of May has given us sunshine and yellow rain and wind warnings, and Thursday in particular seemed like a day beamed in from November, it was appropriate that Today with Claire Byrne had a meteorologist and a physicist on to explain it all to us.
True to form, "Certainly it's a bit unseasonal all right," were the first words out of meteorologist Met Éireann Podcast host Liz Walsh’s mouth. But of course, from the science perspective, that’s exactly what it is: unseasonal weather.
Here’s Liz’s description of what happened with Thursday’s weather:
"Well, we’ve got a low pressure system that the jet stream decided to spin up a little bit and bring us some wind – unseasonal wind and rain."
There’s that word again. It’s funny how it keeps cropping up, because according to physicist Shane Bergin, Ireland has the perfect climate:
"I think we have the perfect weather conditions here in Ireland. It’s not too hot, it’s not too cold. Things grow here virtually all year long. While maybe France or Italy have, kind of, the slight edge on us in terms of the heat and the sunny days, we really do have very, very good weather here."
Hmmm, a slight edge on us? Nice. And the reason why Ireland gets, as Claire says, "so much weather"? It’s all to do with our position on the planet, Liz says:
"We’re this little small island on the outer edge of a large landmass, which is continental Europe, but not only that, we’re at a latitude on the planet where the prevailing wind is south westerly or westerly, so our weather is being carried in off the Atlantic a lot of the time."
What this means is that there are air masses coming from different directions and meeting up over our little small island and, where air masses clash against each other, there’s weather. That’s Ireland for you. Shane Bergin explains further:
"We live on the surface of a planet that has a veil of gas above us and because the sun heats it unevenly – there’s a lot of heat at the equator and not a lot of heat at the poles – the atmosphere distributes that heat, so we get a series of high and low pressures accordingly and we’re right smack at the sweet spot to get a lot of changeable weather."
Lucky us. It’s thanks to the ocean that it doesn’t get too hot or too cold in Ireland. That’s because water has a high heat capacity. Liz explained it with the tea and toast analogy:
"You’ve got a hot cup of tea and a slice of toast and maybe somebody gives you a call and you go off out of the kitchen and you’re on the call with them. And you come back 10 minutes later and your toast – it was straight out of the toaster – it’s cold now. But the tea still has some residual warmth."
In Liz’s analogy, the toast is the land and the tea is the ocean or the sea. Which means we’re the toast and even though we’re heading towards the end of May, we’re cold, wet toast. Unseasonal weather indeed.
You can hear Claire’s full conversation with Liz Walsh and Shane Bergin, including an explanation of the difference between high and low pressure and what it means for our weather, by going here.
The Met Éireann Podcast is available here or wherever you get your podcasts.
