WEATHER:It's a topic of daily conversation and for some it's a matter of life and death. Rosita Bolandasks some of the top meteorologists in the country – at Met Éireann's Glasnevin HQ and Valentia station – about the inexact science of forecasting the weather
THE WEATHER FORECAST. It pulses through our day. We listen for the broadcasts on radio and television. We watch the skies closely. We seek out folklore attached to weather and perform rituals with the statue of Prague to coax a fine day from somewhere mysterious for a wedding. We tend to shun umbrellas in collective displays of frequently misplaced optimism. The weather is watermarked into so many of our conversations that it has become part of our collective national consciousness.
For decades, the data collected hourly around the clock from the 24 stations around the country has been sent to Dublin to be used to analyse weather patterns around the country for the following days, and then broadcast to the nation.
We know these names from the litany of the forecasts: Belmullet, Malin Head, Valentia, Birr, Claremorris . . . What the public probably does not realise is that many of these stations are now automated. Where men – and much later, women – once went out hourly to collect readings, technology now does that task in almost all of our stations. Only six are still manned, and three of those are at airports. These recently automated weather stations are, in a way, now akin to our lighthouses.
Finbarr Maher, who worked for 45 years with the service, and who retired last year from Birr before it was automated a month later, recalls the isolation at some stations 40 and 50 years ago. “I hadn’t a car and neither had either of the other two officers I worked with, so you were confined to barracks in those days, if you like. Between not having a car and sharing a 24-hour shift, the job was a kind of a social killer. There were very few days off. There were long nights. We heard that some men at the really isolated places invited their girlfriends into the stations at night to go courting with them. Not that head office would ever have known about that.”
Local people were constantly asking Maher and his colleagues for a heads up on the forecast. “We’d have farmers calling in constantly, wanting to know from us should they cut their hay the next day or not. They thought we knew more than we did. We weren’t supposed to tell them anything, but they kept asking all the same.”
In some stations, people on the night shift worked alone. “Some people might say they were godforsaken places,” Maher offers. “It was given as a reason why women were not appointed as officers until the 1970s. The idea of putting women into the outer stations in the middle of nowhere was frowned upon. They’d be in a vulnerable position, having to go out on their own in the pitch dark every hour to make observations. You’d never know what might happen to them.”
The headquarters of Met Éireann, also known as the Met Service, is in a distinctive pyramidical-shaped building at Glasnevin in Dublin that dates from 1979. Although the Irish public often refer to the “Met Office” colloquially in conversation, that name is the one used by Britain for its weather services, and is not the correct title for this country. The Met Service here was established in 1936, and while it is now under the Department of the Environment, it was first associated with the Department of Transport. This is because, as Gerald Fleming, head of forecasting in Glasnevin explains, the Met “was originally set up to service the aviation industry”. In fact, prior to the move to its specially-built offices at Glasnevin in Dublin 9, Met Éireann’s headquarters were located above Aer Lingus on Dublin’s O’Connell Street.
Foynes, in Co Limerick, where flying boats arrived from the US, started operating as an airport in the late 1930s. In 1939, the first commercial passenger flight on a direct route from the US to Europe landed there. The basic data traditionally collected hourly at the stations is: temperature, humidity, rainfall, windspeed and direction, visibility, type of cloud cover, height of cloud, and pressure. With automation, most of this data is easily collected and calculated. “What’s really difficult for machines to calculate are visibility and cloud cover,” Fleming says. “It gives less certain information for the forecaster. The instrument can only look at one part of the sky. A human can look at the whole sky, and can tell far more about the cloud type – the colour of it, the shape of it, the size of it, and so on.
“And with visibility, at a station, a human can look around 360 degrees and know that it’s 300 meters to that pub, and 600 to the red house, and so far to the mountains or whatever local landmarks there are in that area. You can stand there and look, and know that you can see one landmark but you can’t see another one, so you figure out an estimated visibility. A machine can’t figure that out. Snow depth is something that’s very difficult to calculate too, because of drifts. A human can go out and stick an instrument into the ground, but a machine can’t do that.”
This difficulty with computers recording visibility and cloud cover is a key reason why weather-observation stations at airports, including Dublin, are among those that remain manned. Although, as Fleming notes drily: “The only observation that really matters is the perspective from the cockpit, because the pilot is the person who has to decide if he can land or not.”
Historically, Met services internationally were established to help address the loss of cargo ships as they plied the oceans from port to port, uncertain of what potentially destructive weather patterns lay around them. In addition to the land-based weather stations that now exist, there are still a number of observation ships at key positions in the oceans which disseminate their data worldwide. As well as these stationary ships, some voyaging ships also record and send data while in transit.
The weather observations were sent in various ways over the years; via Morse code from the telegraph stations, called in by phone, sent by telex, and latterly, via a sophisticated network of computers. In the more remote and exposed stations, such as Malin Head and Belmullet, when gales took the phonelines down, “you didn’t get an observation”. Sometimes, no hourly observation being called in from a particular station where no storms were present would provoke alarm at headquarters.
“You’d hope there wasn’t a problem with the observer,” Fleming says. “That’s when we’d try and get in touch with the local post office to send someone around to the station.” More than once, a failed delivery of an observation led to the discovery of a body in the station, where the officer had had a heart attack while on duty.
The observations are taken in three shifts a day. In Shannon in the 1950s, then very sparsely populated, shift times were determined by the bus-service timetable. “Very few people had cars in the 1950s.”
The key reason weather stations are automated is, unsurprisingly, to do with economics. In 1980, the service employed 360 people. It now employs 170, and this figure is due to decrease still further. “It takes six people to keep one station open,” Fleming reports.
THE BEST-KNOWNsurviving manned station in Ireland is Valentia, which started taking records in 1860. In a very Irish way however, the station, which moved its operations from Valentia Island, Co Kerry, to Cahersiveen on the mainland 118 years ago, is still referred to as Valentia.
Keith Lambkin is the chief scientist at Valentia, which has a staff of 17. “Valentia has always been an important station because it is one of the first places in Europe to experience air masses and weather fronts. It’s the first human lookout on the weather before it passes into Europe,” Lambkin explains. Valentia is thus a type of ship’s crow’s nest, from where people peer into what lies ahead.
The station at the edge of Cahersiveen town is located in a 19th-century building, formerly a private home called Westwood House. Operations moved here in 1892 when the wife of the then chief scientist Edward Cullum decided she did not want to live in such a remote place as Valentia Island. She also wanted to reside in a larger house, or so the story goes.
Westwood must be one of the most beautiful, if oddest, State buildings in use in the country. The former drawing rooms, dining rooms, bedrooms and kitchens are used as offices, but retain their period features – cornices, fireplaces, staircases, and huge windows that frame astonishing views of the nearby ocean and mountains.
Collectively, Michael Griffin (77), Paud Mahoney (69) and Con Curran (77), have 138 years of Met service between then, most of that at Valentia. They recall stories they heard from colleagues they first met half a century ago, who had worked at Valentia in the 1920s. During the Civil War, for instance, shooting could be seen from the windows of the Observatory. Yet, the hourly observations were still made, by a man going out holding a white flag, and crawling to the instrument boxes.
They wonder now why Westwood House was never targeted in the Civil War, when many other houses in the area were burned “even though the man in charge here was British”, as Curran points out. “Probably because it gave employment to the area,” Mahoney suggests.
The only damage done during that time was the theft of a theodolite; a type of telescope, which was apparently taken up a nearby mountainside to be used by the rebels.
Although Ireland achieved its independence in 1922, the Met Service remained under British administration until 1936. Mahoney recalls that when Valentia was administered by the British, there was a tennis court attached to the Observatory, and an orchard. The orchard survives, the tennis court does not. The lawns that surround the Observatory today were once meadow, where corncrakes nested until 20 years ago
There are paper records still retained at Valentia, some of which offer insights into the changeover from British administration. In a carbon copy of a typed letter dated 1938, there is a tart request. “Please arrange for the supply of the following equipment to Valentia Observatory. 5 office tables. 6 ordinary office chairs. I pair rubber knee boots, size 7. 1 pair rubber knee boots size 8. 1 oilskin coat. 2 souwester hats size 3. This equipment is required to replace items taken over from the British which are now in a very dilapidated condition.”
A feature unique in Ireland of the station at Valentia is the fact that it launches a metrological weather balloon, which provides vertical information about the current state of the atmosphere. At noon, midnight, 6am and 6pm, a balloon is launched. Witnessing the noontime balloon launch from the roof of the Observatory is a thrilling experience: the huge white helium-filled balloon is spat out into the sky like a bubble from a wand and travels skywards faster than a bird. A small transmitter is attached, which sends back data until the balloon bursts, sometimes at the staggering height of 35km.
The balloons are now filled with helium on-site, but they used to be filled with hydrogen. Until the Cahersiveen railway station closed in 1962, cylinders arrived by train and were transported to the Observatory by horse and cart, something which the three men all clearly recall. Children in Cahersiveen have traditionally been called in for their tea when the 6pm balloon goes up.
Griffin, Mahoney and Curran also recall the difficulty there was in launching the older, much larger balloons, which took as many as six men to launch in stormy weather. Sometimes they burst, and the whole process had to begin again. The transmitters that accompanied the balloons carried a reward of five shillings if found. Today, it’s €30. While many of them end up in the Atlantic, some have been returned from Wales, southwestern England, and all across Ireland.
When they began working at Valentia, “it was all turf fires for heating”, they recall, pointing to the fireplace in the room we are in, now boarded up. The only women on the premises in their time were cleaners. “And now there’s a man cleaner, imagine!” Griffin marvels.
ONE OF THEfirst women to be appointed into the service when it did open to women was Evelyn Cusack, now deputy head of forecasting, who has worked there since 1981. "We had to go to Galway for training," she recalls. "The first day we were there, it was raining, and we were told we were being brought out to watch an observation. I said, 'But it's raining!' and everyone laughed."
Since 1982, Cusack has been based at Glasnevin. When she arrived at Met Éireann's newly-built offices that year, she discovered no female toilets had been included in the plans, and initially she had to use the men's, until they made one unisex. "I was shocked," she declares flatly. "It was a newoffice."
Cusack is familiar to the public from her regular television weather reports on RTÉ, which she prepares herself. “Forecasting is an inexact science. It’s a prediction of a future that hasn’t happened yet, unlike the results of a sporting match.”
Since most of the outlying stations have now been automated, their paper records have been sent to headquarters in Glasnevin. In the library there, there are scores of hardback ledgers filled with observations and calculations, written in beautiful, faded copperplate. In addition to the standard observations such as rainfall and pressure, some records also contain other data.
The Phoenix Park records, for example, which were taken at the observatory attached to the Ordnance Survey Offices there, also contain leafing information, and details of prevalent diseases in the area for that month. The association between weather and certain forms of illnesses had been made. In April 1855, under “Prevalent Disease” was written: “The most prevalent disease, during the month of April, was Influenza; which still assumes the form of severe Bronchitis. There have been, likewise, some very bad cases of Typhus fever and also common fever. There has been no new case of cholera, during the month, in this district.”
Under the column headed “Arrival or Departure of Birds of Passage. On the Leafing, Budding, c. Of Trees and Plants,” was recorded, “Leafing:- Lilac, Chestnut and Privot. Flowering:- Primrose, Daffodil and Cowslip. Fruit:- none.”
Cumulative data such as this, gathered over decades, is extremely valuable in tracking when indigenous flora and fruit leaf, flower and ripen, as global warming brings forward those occurrences in the year. This data was not routinely collected at all stations, but the Phoenix Park records alone offer an insight into growth patterns in that area.
There is no point asking Gerald Fleming, Finbarr Maher, Keith Lambkin, Evelyn Cusack, Michael Griffin, Paud Mahoney, Con Curran or any other meteorologist what kind of weather we might expect this winter, although I can’t resist doing so. Will there be snow again? Ice and frost and freezing temperatures for weeks on end, as there was this December and January gone by? The simple fact is that the meteorologists don’t know. Accurate forecasts in our weather patterns can only be given for about the next 10 days. The most accurate forecast is that given for the next three to five days, with the accuracy of the forecast diminishing by the day.
However, a forecast is an extremely valuable piece of information, particularly if some high-cost, weather-dependent job is due to be scheduled. Aside from providing media with regular bulletins and providing a public service, Met Éireann also has a number of private clients. It will, for example, provide more specialised and localised information for agricultural contractors, rather than the general national overview forecast the public receives.
During the boom, developers sought information on forthcoming wind patterns in particular areas, as cranes cannot operate during high winds. Expensive operations such as road building and resurfacing are also weather-dependent. The National Roads Authority seeks information about the need to grit roads ahead of icy conditions. It is still aviation, though, that Gerald Fleming confirms is their biggest earner. All monies earned from these private clients “goes back into the coffers”.
There are also inquiries from prospective wedding parties, wondering what the weather on their wedding day will be like, especially if marquees are involved. “We don’t charge for that,” Fleming discloses. “We just wish them well. But of course, we can only offer them a forecast a few days ahead; a week at the most. We have sometimes had people ask for a forecast 18 months in advance.”
The service has never had a claim lodged against it for inaccurate forecasting. “Flooding has been a particular problem in Ireland lately, but we have no hydrology knowledge,” Fleming stresses. “We forecast rainfall and once it hits the ground, we’ve nothing to do with it. We don’t take records of flooding, only of rainfall. A lot of flooding is due to the extent of building we’ve had, and developments being built in the wrong place. Once you pave over an area, water behaves differently.”
At Glasnevin, in the busy and surprisingly small room where data is sent through to RTÉ for its daily broadcasts, there is a cluttered noticeboard. Prominent on it is a piece of yellowing newspaper. It is a clipping of a Weather Eye column, an immensely popular daily meditation on the weather, which was written by the late Brendan McWilliams for this newspaper from 1988 until his death in 2007.
Someone has inscribed on it sternly in red pen: “Please read and do not remove.” McWilliams had written: “When it comes to long-range weather forecasts, it sometimes seems that the best advice might be that of Mark Twain.” Underlined, also in red, is Twain’s quote: “It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.”
