Forecast

Doctor Funfrock

Hi im thinking of taking my girlfriend away for a weekend to Carlow during the next month and I need to find long term forecasts??

thanks,
danny :cool:

A few days is the best that can be done really...
After that it's the unpredictability of mother nature.

The best I can offer you is Bill Giles predictions for the month ahead, available on the BBC weather site, there is a linkie in the weather links sticky.
He uses a variety of tools and models and workarounds combined with a healthy knowledge/experience of past history and trends to come up with predictions.

These are often remarkably not far off.

Capt'n Midnight

Don't forget that satellites can't measure everything and since there are fewer weather ships (are there any?) in the atlantic, and planes fly above the weather, the first of certain types of measurements can only happen at our west coast. For those in the UK it mean they have a buffer zone - they inherit our weather. So for most of the time the UK forecasts can be better than ours because they know what sort of weather to expect based on experiance in neighbouring countries.

I've always heard that our met office was pretty hot when it came to computerised forecasts - no idea if long or short term - any one know ?

The farming weather on RTE would be about the longest range one on this side of the pond.

Originally posted by Capt'n Midnight
since there are fewer weather ships (are there any?) in the atlantic,

Well most large ships crossing the atlantic would relay accurate weather information from their current positions to the met office, not necessarilly in Dublin but certainly to the UK.
All would have access to that in compiling the forecasts.
There are also a number of weather buoys, some of which are hundreds of miles off our coast which relay weather information to met Éireann.

Dappergent might fill us in more on the info from the ships.

Capt'n Midnight

One problem is that ships tend to stay in shipping lanes and the gulf current makes it more efficient to avoid certain areas. IIRC they have solar powered automatic weather boats down in New Zealand or somewhere for this reason.

DapperGent

There are two buoys off the west coast, one directly west and one to the south west, the western one is about 60 miles out which helps but doesn't really compare with the dense coverage you get from land stations. Given that the vast majority of our weather rolls in off the atlantic the lack of proper coverage over the atlantic is what makes predicting Irish weather challenging. As Capt'n Midnight says the UK inherits our weather so they have a bit of an easier time of it with the good coverage from stations on the island of Ireland.

Satelite pictures are great but the most powerful tool in the forecasters armoury is numerical weather prediction, these computer models work from numerical inputs of pressure, temperature, humidity, wind speed etc. which a satelite image can't give them. Ships help but again as Capt'n Midnight says the coverage is patchy most of them feed directly into the general feed of weather observations that is available to anyone in the world and which can then be used as NWP inputs. Another approach has been to dump automated buoys off the side of ships and allowing them to drift before being collected, they're not as good as big proper weather buoys but at least they don't have to be serviced at horrific expense but they're at the mercy of the currents and may not go where you want them to.

One solution being proposed and developed is automated weather planes (about the size of the big model ones) that can fly thousands of miles over the ocean collected the data and being directed to where the coverage is poor. I think those yokes would be pretty cool.

Originally posted by DapperGent
I think those yokes would be pretty cool.

We'll take turns flying them, if they arent automated...
You first

DapperGent

I want a headup display with a joystick.

And something to shoot down.