Donal Hickey: April a capricious month as we move from showers to flowers

People in medieval times depended on weather lore for their forecasts with many people in rural Ireland still mindful of the old proverbs

April weather can be mixed, with everything from sunshine to buckets of rain and gusty conditions.

There’s a lot of obvious truth in the old proverb about April showers bringing forth May flowers. As we’ve just seen, April can be a capricious month with very mixed weather - sunshine, frost, cold, hail, buckets of rain and gusty conditions.

Dating from medieval times when people depended on weather lore for their forecasts, the proverb has long been embedded in the national psyche.

This month, weather has been mixed to say the least, with typical, variable conditions for Ireland and coastal northern Europe when even snow and frost can be expected.

Rob Thompson, a postdoctoral research scientist and lecturer in meteorology at the University of Reading, UK, explains April showers are caused by a process through which hot air rises upwards from the surface. When it meets colder air higher up, the atmosphere becomes unstable, producing rain.

“By spring, it is quite noticeable how much warmer it is in the sun than the shade. The mid-April sun is actually as strong as that in late August,’’ he notes.

Writing in The Conversation, he says one of the major drivers of spring showers is the jet stream, a band of very strong winds around 10km above sea level that controls the weather we experience on the ground.

“In the spring, the jet stream moves northwards, which can bring rather unsettled weather - the cause of those March winds in the proverb. The other effect is increased passage of weather fronts that usually bring bands of rain,’’ says Mr Thompson who describes himself as a rainfall scientist.

But back to weather lore, to which many people in rural Ireland still refer. Vincent Guiney, from Kiskeam, County Cork, has been in touch to tell us about an accurate prediction some years ago by an elderly neighbour, Johnny O’Mahony.

Known as an intelligent man and an astute observer of the natural world, Johnny, since deceased, noted that frogs had spawned very early in January 2012.

“He told me the weather would be disastrous that year. What’s more, he said the first half of 2013 would be an even bigger disaster; the year when cows were inside until May in some parts of the country. He was right in both cases,’’ Vincent recalled.

Frogs spawn between January and March, with weather being a factor in the timing. So what about the weather outlook for the remainder of this year?

Vincent saw spawn around February 3, believing it to have been there earlier - not a good sign of the weather! “So far, it has been very poor and we could be in for a bad year,’’ he warned.