Meteorologists are popularly seen as augurs, prophets, crystal-gazers, seers, or even sibyls or Cassandras, but they have another much less glamorous role: they are historians, custodians of the weather of the past.
Lytton Strachey, in Eminent Victorians, remarked of that profession: "Ignorance is the first requisite of the historian - ignorance which simplifies and clarifies, which reflects and omits, with a perfection attainable only by the highest art."
And while rejecting totally the general drift of his remark as it applies to them, climatologists would seize upon the "simplify" and "clarify" and say: "Yes! That's it. That is precisely what we do!" They reduce the rich variety of the weather in a given period to a kind of average, adding, by way of salt and pepper, a few extremes and a frequency or two.
Let us see what they say of Irish weather, 1998.
It was, by all accounts, another warm year. The average temperature was about a degree above the normal value, continuing a succession of statistically sultry years which has continued now since 1994.
But as you might expect from your personal experience, this high average came about not because the day-time temperatures were exceptionally high but because the night-time temperatures were not as low as normal.
The first three months, particularly, of 1998 were very mild indeed, and many places experienced their mildest February on record.
As you probably remember too, it was a dull, wet summer, and the autumn was the wettest for 15 years. The highest rainfall total for the year occurred in Co Kerry: Valentia Observatory experienced 1,782 mm (70 inches), which is more than 25 per cent above the normal value.
Indeed, almost everywhere in Ireland it was the wettest year for nearly half a century, and also the windiest for quite a time.
But what about the highlights? The coldest day was April 10th, in the early hours of which the thermometer at Casement Aerodrome dropped to 5.5C, and the severe frost that night caused serious damage to early crops in eastern parts of Ireland. The wettest day was August 31st, when 76 mm (3 inches) of rain descended from the heavens over Cork.
The windiest, as no doubt you well recall, was December 26th, and the warmest day was September 21st, when 25.4C was recorded at Belmullet.
It is, of course, very interesting to know about these things. But in the end, as the old rhyme says:
Whether the weather be cold,
Or whether the weather be hot,
We must weather the weather,
Whatever the weather,
Whether we like it or not.