A peep into Mr. Ring’s weather crystal ball

The autumnal equinox has passed and the clock change is just around the corner – it’s a time too when the speculation starts about what kind of Winter lies ahead for us.

Usually around now, the articles start to appear about the possibility of a White Christmas arriving on our doorsteps, although in this regard, we should be careful in terms of what we wish for.

All the ‘romance’ of a White Christmas was forever erased from my expectations with the big freeze-up in December, 2010, when the thermometer dropped to around -15° Celsius, or below, in many parts of the country.

No water in the taps, no toilets flushing, no water in the sheds for thirsty cattle delivers a knock-out blow to postcard images of snow covered trees and red robins, but since then we’ve returned to milder times.

At that time,  there were many harbingers of doom predicting that such savagely cold spells would be our winter norm over the coming years, but extremely severe winters are thankfully the exception rather than the usual thanks to our proximity to the Atlantic.

Over recent weeks, I’ve been in touch with New Zealand’s long term weather forecaster, Ken Ring, who bases his predictions primarily on the cycles of the moon and sun, past weather records and astrology.

He does qualify his use of astrology on the basis that centuries back, this embraced the study of the sun, moon, planets and tidal patterns. The likes of Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler were all, in their time, classified as astrologists, according to Ken Ring.

Mention of Ken Ring’s name though tends to send conventional meteorologists and scientists into something of a spin, on the basis that in certain parts of the world, such as Ireland on the edge of the Atlantic, forecasters are ‘at the pin of their collar’ to predict the weather for even four to five days in advance not to mind a year ahead.

And while it is hard to believe that anyone on the planet can predict a wet evening in Roscommon 12 months in advance, Ken Ring’s main claim to fame is in the general patterns that he predicts for the year ahead.

One way or another, he’s no ‘flat’ with his weather almanacs big sellers in the southern hemisphere and also in Ireland. A former teacher of mathematics and English, he has the most vehement of critics who rubbish his predictions but to balance that out, he has many loyal followers who claim that he’s never too far out with his long term forecasts.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.