Me and My Job: Given the notoriously fickle Irish weather, which can offer all four seasons in just one day, predicting can be a very tough task indeed. Catherine Foley reports
They can see weather approaching across the ocean. It's one of the thrills of the job, says Sarah O'Reilly, a weather forecaster at Met Éireann. "You can see the systems moving over the Atlantic," she says.
At the Central Analysis and Forecast Office in Glasnevin, Dublin, it's a hive of activity. There are regular radio broadcasts to make, forecasts to write, conferences to attend and there is the constant monitoring and analyses of the changing weather.
All around there are winking monitors, which provide round-the-clock information on weather systems throughout the world. There's an air of intense activity, especially coming up to lunch-time when weather bulletins are being prepared for local and national radio stations.
All the information is fed into a computer program, which produces a forecast model. The forecasters must read these models and based on these, decide what the weather forecast is going to be. Heads are down as forecasters work away at their desks. "We have a set of observations every hour from around the world on a chart," says O'Reilly. "A forecast model gives a prediction of what the weather can do for the next five to 10 days." The forecast models, which are produced to give a prognosis of the surface climate are generally quite accurate, she says. However, she adds, they can also be wrong. "The models aren't always perfect." This is where experience and the trained eye of the forecaster comes in. "We have to interpret the models. The models that we use are getting better and better at predicting.
"It's very satisfying work because it's easy to see how my work is useful to people in general. Experience is the big one when it comes to forecasting. I have to be quite alert all the time. I need to be decisive as well. I need to consider all the evidence and be able to back that decision up. There's a lot pressure of there but we work as a team, the responsibility isn't individual. There are only some parts of the day that you would be on your own."
O'Reilly, who is a qualified meteorologist, has worked at Met Éireann for two years. She says she always enjoyed maths and physics at school. After her Leaving Cert in 1993, she went to Trinity College Dublin to study theoretical physics. The four-year course was "tough, but it was rewarding and interesting", she says. She especially loved "the practical aspects of the maths . . . working out the maths of real things, seeing that you could use maths in the real world. We had a course in fluid mechanics, which is related to meteorology - the atmosphere is fluid."
After graduating in 1998, she went to NUI Galway to do a PhD the department of physics. Her studies "to do with climate change" involved looking at "the radioactive forcing of the climate by atmospheric aerosol particles in the air". She worked on this project over two years, regularly visiting the remote outpost of Mace Head in Connemara, Co Galway, to study the atmospheric readings there. This site is part of a global network of observation points, which measure the aerosol particles, she says.
Her interest in aerosols, which are particles suspended in the air, began here. "They can scatter right up into space. If there's increased cloud cover, then that can lead to a cooling of the earth's atmosphere, which is a counter-effect to the greenhouse effect that warms the earth. The aerosol particles vary a lot over the earth's surface. They are often close to the source regions - big cities, industrialised parts of Europe."
When she began work in the met office she spent 18 weeks training in Reading, England, to be a forecaster. "You would have to have an interest in the weather. Every day the weather is different, you don't have the same weather, it's very rarely the same," she says. "The great thing about the job is when I come home I don't need to worry about it. Someone takes over, you can either get it done or you don't, there's no spillover."
For those working together, she says: "it's important that we are able to communicate together easily and to discuss the arriving weather scenario."
Since she started here, there haven't been "any big storms", apart from the heavy snow fall last year. But when it snows, the office gets really busy, she says. And "there are waves" of business throughout the day and night. The forecasters do reports on the weather three times in a 24 hour cycle - it's a short three-paragraph report that looks at "today, tonight and tomorrow". This goes out on broadcasts such as Nuacht and Today FM.
Another positive aspect of the job is that "you actually learn from your mistakes. If you investigate what you did, you learn and the whole time you are fine-tuning your methods," she explains.
One of the most exciting aspects of the job is being able to see weather approaching. But as for the old sayings such as "red sky at night, shepherds delight": "Some of them would ring through and there are situations in which they could be perfectly true but I wouldn't like to go out sailing on the basis of whether it was going to be wet or dry."
