END of year is a busy time for many organisations. Accounts must be settled, stocks checked, books balanced, and everything prepared to start a new year with a clean slate. Weather services have no exemption from these housekeeping chores, but for them the end of the year is a doubly busy period the weather books are waiting to be balanced, too.
Balancing the weather books in this sense means looking at the weather of 1996 to see how it compares with its predecessors down the yeas. Peter Lennon, the climatologist in Met Eireann responsible for compiling these statistics, tends to follow the advice of Lady Macbeth, believing that "If twere done when tis done, then twere well it were done quickly" he has all the salient information ready long before the bell of Christ Church toll the old year's knell.
The early weeks so of 1996 were memorably wet, with severe January flooding in many places, most notably in Clonmel. This opening deluge faded into a cool, wet spring which seemed to last forever. May, particularly, was the coldest of its ilk for 30 years or more, and it seemed as if a high price was to be exacted for the balmy pleasures of the summer of the previous year.
But summer came, as come she will. The middle week of June provided the warmest and sunniest spell of the entire year, and also its highest temperature when the thermometer touched 27 degrees at Shannon Airport on the 16th. July was mixed there was sunshine to be had if you were lucky, but heavy rain at times, and flooding, too this time most notably at Boyle, Co Roscommon, where more than 80 millimetres of rain fell in as many minutes on the 28th. You may also remember the heavy August rains that greeted the returning heroines from Atlanta. But that month also contained a modicum of "pet days", sufficient to make the pattern just tolerable and to balance the statistics to near normal values.
Autumn began in style with a magnificent September, more like a real summer than most of summer itself. But the season also produced two memorable storms, one on October 27th-28th, and another on November 5th-6th which provided winds comparable to those of Hurricane Debbie back in 1961. And finally December brought the coldest weather of the year and the uneasy feeling of having escaped a White Christmas only by the very skin of our teeth.
In short, 1996 was a nondescript year, good in spots like the proverbial curate's egg, and a familiar cocktail of our Irish weather ordinaire.