Winter 2021/2022 - General Discussion

Cycling in Dublin just now. Some of the biggest gusts I have witnessed over the past year or so!

Out at sandycove today, was able to lean my full weight into the wind unsupported. Lovely and sunny though which is a nice change!

In fairness our average high in December (well in Dublin at least) is about 8.3º.

Vancouver is 6.3º according to that chart.

That 2º over the course of an entire month is actually fairly big.

Was that today? I was in bed most of the day so missed that

The difference in the winter mean temperatures for Vancouver and locations in Ireland is dependent on whether or not arctic air shows up; some winters it does not show up and the means are quite similar as a result in those milder months. Other years it shows up for a week to even a month at a time, as it did in January 1950 which averaged about -5 C. Even so the lowest temperature that month (which remains the extreme for the location since records began in the 1880s) was -18 C which is not terribly different from all-time record lows in Ireland.

The milder Pacific air masses are about the same temperature as your mild Atlantic air masses. Daily record highs would be comparable.

The summers as somebody mentions above are a lot warmer and with considerably more sunshine after June which can be a rather cloudy month in the region. A normal July-August would have monthly averages around 18 C and sunshine of 300-350 hours a month. September is more similar and October probably very similar, November if anything a bit wetter than Ireland although maybe not all parts.

I have lived out here for 27 years now and about five of those winters were severe on the coast, another five or so had no wintry weather at all, and the rest usually see one or two week-long spells and the odd day of bitter cold. It's an odd climate in that you can get arctic air in as late as May after all spring blooming is complete. I can recall two occasions when it snowed in May and brought down all the pink petals on cherry trees at the end of their spectacular two-month display.

There is also very little thunderstorm activity near the coast. It picks up rapidly inland and becomes very frequent over the Cascades and further inland.

We are having an extreme cold spell now, my current mid-day temperature is -18 C under blue skies and patchy low cloud over nearby mountains -- if it can stay clear some night in this spell we might get down towards -30 but each night so far has been mostly overcast, and there's another front moving in from the northwest tonight so I expect it might bottom out around midnight at -26 or so then start rising as snow moves in. We have about 35 cms of powdery snow cover and there has not been much wind recently so the trees are coated with snow. The odd thing is that this severe cold is exactly six months after the heat dome where we were setting high temperature records; it was 44 C here on 30th of June and 1st of July. Those were of course all-time records; the all-time cold records are from January 1950 when locally it was around -35 C and closer to -40 or -45 in some valleys further north. That is when Vancouver had their -18 C all-time record. The month was severely cold in this entire region and some places had anomalies of -10 or -12 compared to their normals.

I wouldn't complain about your climate, we have had severe smoke problems here in three of the past five and five of the past ten summers. It wasn't that frequent in the 1990s and then started to become more of a problem in the hotter climate that seemed to set in around 2003 in this part of the world. But historical sketches of the region say that forest fire smoke was also quite frequent in the 1920s, the climate may not have been as warm or dry then but there was no active forest fire suppression so eventually whatever nature had in store would rage unchecked until the autumn rains put the fires out. We have had some moderate seasons where the firefighting activities have kept the smoke from becoming as bad as it might, but when you get a severe season then it overwhelms those efforts and the smoke gets very noxious. Our air "quality" reading here at the end of July 2021 was 400 ppm of particulates where 32 is considered tolerable. I came down with COVID like symptoms that might have been a direct response to breathing in that noxious air for a few days. As soon as the air cleared up a bit my symptoms went away too. But the air quality here was terrible for about eight or nine days (it took most of that time to get at me though). When we get severe smoke here, the visibility drops to about a half mile and the sun can look like it is behind cloud layers but red instead of orange, like a dim traffic light. It is rather strange when it is also very warm and humid and there's ash falling from the low cloud deck. I think I have done my duty for the anti-immigration movement. :)

I was born in England and have been over on several holiday trips so I have some rather limited experience of the damp climate, also I managed to time most of those holiday trips for particularly dire summers but I only have the faint childhood memories of winter weather conditions -- however, it is very damp a lot of the time in Vancouver and even here in a normal winter, we don't get this severe cold and an absence of the mixed rain-snow regime very often, even up here it rains in the winter months occasionally and turns everything to ponds of slush in town, somehow they manage to keep a snow base intact out at the ski hills. There were some winters where Vancouver was so frequently wet that it got depressing and forced us to take a break in the desert to maintain any form of sanity. Also there's no shortage of damp dismal late autumn and early winter days in Ontario where I spent the other half of my life in Canada. It comes with breaks but you can get into days on end of low cloud and drizzly mixed crud. Nov-Dec are the worst for it. In a COVID world it doesn't matter much where you are I suppose but in normal times if I were wealthy (which I am not, no surprise there) I would choose to spend a good part of my life in Ireland and maybe Scotland, maybe not so much for the weather, but I know it can be very pleasant too. I do like the desert and its climate too, especially the high desert in Utah where it's not excessively hot in summer.

I know it has been said a bit recently but there does seem to be some truth in us alternating between very dry and very wet spells, in between seems to have deserted us lately.

Relentless rain here all day in South Wicklow, hasn't stopped since early this morning. Some local roads flooded here with plenty more rain forecast until the early hours. Grim I think is the word.

Yep.

Just as I'm putting a roof on a building. Balls

I'm just glad long range forecasting is wildy inaccurate. I don't see the point in writing off the winter when the first month of it hasnt even ended. A lot can happen in the next 8-10 weeks and the weather has a habit of making fools out of us over and over again. If we can't get some decent cold or settled spells then a few big storms will do!

No. I'm not in the write it off camp. Mid January onwards anything is possible. Possibly a Northerly toppler early next week, better than 14c and flies getting in the window when the light is on at the end of December. Absolutely ridiculous ha.