Weather forecaster on a hot streak for predictions
Or maybe there is.
You could try contacting Ken Ring, a long-range weather forecaster from Auckland, New Zealand, who evokes much admiration and occasional hostility for the accuracy of his predictions.
He can tell you whether it is likely to rain on, say the 25th or 26th of that month and, considering his past performance, a marquee would probably be a safe bet.
Don’t ask him, though, whether you should bring a brolly to work tomorrow. That’s far too immediate for his liking.
“You can ask Met Éireann that,” he says dismissively. “They’ll be able to tell you what the weather will be like over the next few days.”
For Ring, it’s all about looking way into the future, with a weather eye on the past. Last January he said that our winter would last right into spring and beyond and that April and May would be wetter and colder than usual.
In March, while conventional forecasters in Britain were warning of another summer washout, Ring forecast a heatwave in Ireland and Britain reminiscent of the temperatures of 1995, with three largely dry months — July, August and September.
At the time, Met Éireann’s Harm Luijks poured cold water on the predictions.
“It is ridiculous. Science does not allow us to forecast more than two weeks in advance. That has not changed and it is not going to change,” he said. He told The Irish Times that long-term predictions rarely stand up to scrutiny. “When people like Mr Ring get it wrong you never hear from them, but when they get it right they shout it from the rooftops,” he said.
But Ring was spot on. He predicted that July would see Irish temperatures reach a tropical 30C, with possible drought conditions expected in August, followed by a balmy September.
So far, so accurate, but all that good news is a bit hard to take in, especially when you consider that Ring uses no more than historical analysis, the phases of the moon and his own considerable brain power to guide him and his team of five. He sees the current ways of predicting weather as seriously restrained by orthodox thinking.
“Conventional meteorology is technology-oriented, and the use of cameras mounted under satellites to photograph the tops of clouds is considered the way to forecast coming weather over the next day or so.
“Any comment on weather in a month or six months down the track is impossible using those resources.”
Ring recently received trenchant criticism from powerful political forces in New Zealand, accusing him of panicking people with forecasts of more earthquakes after the Christchurch earthquake of Sept 2010. The following February disaster struck in Christchurch with another, devastating quake.
“The thing is, I got the next largest earthquakes correct every time, which showed up the geologists as being incompetent. They said there would not be another earthquake for 18,000 years, then changed it to 500-600 years ‘somewhere else’. I said no, there’d be another destructive one six months from Sept 2010, and there was. The proof is there that I achieved what no one else could with their mainstream science.”
Surprisingly, he dismisses global warming as a pseudo-science gone mad. “I think it’s nonsense. There is no global temperature when at any moment half the world is in winter and the other half in summer, and half are in daylight and the rest are enjoying their night. With no global thermometer there can be no idea about warming.
“Plus, there is no thermometer that can project 50 years ahead. Plus, before the 1990s and digital technology, all, old, glass thermometers could not read tenths, and yet we hear the temperature rose by 0.7C over a century. In any case, we have only been taking verifiable records for about half a century at the most.
“To now claim that climate is affected by car fumes, planting or cutting down trees, recycling aluminium cans, throwing out old fridges, lighting camp fires — all leading up to some justification for levying carbon taxes — is absurd. Even cutting down all the rain forests in one day would not affect climate one iota. Weather is generated about eight miles up and impacts downwards and is not generated by what happens to be on the ground.”
Ring is a relative latecomer to the business of weather forecasting. “I was always interested as a kid in how the world worked. In the 1970s, when my children were small, our family left the city and tried a camping life living beside the sea for about 10 years, fishing almost every day and home schooling.
“That’s how the weather interest started, because I began to notice weather patterns coming and going.
“It was quickly obvious that if the air and sea were joined, and rain was lifted from the sea, then an air tide existed.
“If that was true, then it would be a cycle that could be plotted in advance. So I gradually, over about four years, uncovered a basic weather pattern based on tidal cycles. I subsequently found out all I could about the moon and realised that weather events came and went quite predictably at certain times of various lunar cycles.”
Later he became a maths teacher and musician, and taught music and he still plays guitar and a five-string banjo. “I also became a school magician with a mathematics act which I kept up for 18 years visiting over a thousand schools.”
He also visited schools in Britain which gave him an opportunity to explore stone circles, a mysterious phenomenon he came to regard as ancient weather calculators.
“Stonehenge and Newgrange are among the biggest, but they all use the same methods. Drombeg stone circle in West Cork operates on exactly the same principle. It is aligned to the moon and allowed the people who lived in its vicinity to predict the weather with amazing accuracy.”
What’s in store for Ireland over the next three years:
- 2013 should have most rain and 2015 the least, with 2014 in the middle position.
- 2013 is likely to be the wettest for northern, central and western counties and 2014 wettest for southern and eastern counties.
- 2013 may be the best year for sunshine amounts, with 2015 the cloudiest, and 2014 in the middle position.
- For temperatures, 2015 may be warmest overall, with 2013 second warmest and 2014 the coolest.
- For wind speed trends, 2013 wind speeds will be greater than for 2014, which again exceeds 2015.
That means 2013 may be wetter, sunnier and windier than the two years following.
- Prediction: May of 2009, Ring forecast that summer in Ireland would finally arrive in September and be short-lived.
- Result: The weather improved in September. Summer lasted two weeks and was gone again.
- Prediction: Irish winter of 2009 would be extremely wet.
- Result: The winter was very wet with widespread flooding.
- Prediction: In early 2010 Ring forecast a bitterly cold winter to come here.
- Result: 2010 was one of the coldest winters in years.
- Prediction: Sept 3, 2010, he predicted high winds and earthquakes on New Zealand’s South Island.
- Result: Sept 4, 2010, a 7.1 quake struck Christchurch.
- Summers past: Ireland’s weather was not always as cold as it is today.
During the Medieval Warm Period, from the 10th to the 14th centuries, Ireland was even a noted, wine-producing nation, as Rory Fitzgerald reveals in the June edition of the Irish Catholic.
“As far back as the 5th Century, a Cistercian monastery in Kilkenny planted a vineyard,” he writes.
“Many other monasteries around the country followed suit, and Ireland became well-known as a wine producer, with a 14th Century Irish Dominican Friar, Father Geoffery, even travelling to the Middle East teaching Irish wine expertise to the locals, and writing tracts on the topic.”
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