You cannot hope to predict the weather if you do not know what it is doing at the moment. And a difficulty traditionally experienced by Irish weather forecasters has been the dearth of information from the ocean to the west.
An important development in this context took place in the midst of the great storms in late October: the Irish Marine Data Buoy Network came into being, and MI-1 took up position about 50 miles to the west of Inishmore.
MI-1 is a weather buoy, as you will probably have guessed. It is about 18 feet high and six feet wide, and it was anchored in the Atlantic by the Marine Institute's research vessel, Celtic Voyager.
Every hour it transmits via satellite, for the use of forecasters in Ireland, Britain and other parts of Europe, reports of wind speed and direction, atmospheric pressure, relative humidity, the height of the waves and the temperature of the sea and air. It cost about £100,000 to build, but Ireland has acquired it for a token £1.
The Irish Marine Data Buoy Network is a joint venture between four agencies: Met Eireann, the Department of the Marine and the Marine Institute, from Ireland, and the British Meteorological Office, which has provided MI-1 at nominal cost in return for the Irish contribution in deploying and maintaining it. MI-2 will be identical, and will be anchored early in 2001 just east of Dublin in the Irish Sea.
An important aspect of the co-operative effort, however, involving the existing partners together with a number of Irish companies and some international players, is a research project to develop a new series of "METOCEAN" buoys; these will have the added capability of measuring the salinity of the water and the speed of ocean currents.
As they are produced they will be deployed over the next few years off the coasts of Wexford, Donegal and Kerry, in addition to becoming the standard buoy to be used by the UK Meteorological Office.
MI-1 began transmitting its reports at 0900 on November 6th, and they are now providing invaluable information to our forecasters on the intensity of approaching storms. The reports are available to the public on Weatherdial Fax, and in due course the Marine Institute proposes to make them freely available on the Internet.
In the meantime, and perhaps most importantly of all, the institute has launched "Oh Buoy - Watch Out!", a promotional campaign aimed at persuading fishing and yachting crews and international shipping to give MI-1 a wide berth and avoid bumping into our new buoy.