Getting the forecast right?

That's high pressure stuff..

- BY DEREK FOLEY

FORMER weather broadcaster and national treasure Evelyn Cusack adds a personal touch in a new book on this country’s favourite topic - the weather.

A physicist by education, Met Eireann employee by salary, hands-on meteorologist and RTE weather presenter by renown, Cusack is fondly identified as a friendly, upbeat personality via the TV screen.

Her new book They Say It Might Rain, which is coauthored with Seamus Walsh, is a mix of candour, meteorological history, high-stakes on-camera and behind-the-scenes drama.

Weather is complicated; that butterfly that flaps its wings in China can indeed cause complications around the other side of the world.

And forecasting is not just concerned with alerting Dublin 4 residents as to whether they should take a brolly into town or from the car to the golf clubhouse.

It is more important than that - it is a matter of life and death, profit and loss, for the likes of Atlantic trawlermen and farmers.

ATTACHED

Consider this: the Irish Met Service is attached to our Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage but there is a reason the USA has their equivalent as part of the Department of Commerce.

Weather takes up whole ministries in places such as China and India, while, reflecting the needs of our nearest neighbours, the UK Met Office - originally established in 1854 by the Board of Trade - was taken over by the Ministry of Defence just after the First World War and remained there until 2011.

As the book attests, cows’ ears and swallows and dandelions have little place among the regimens of modern climate supercomputers and the quest for slide-rule accuracy. The fact is animals reflect the weather, they don't predict it.

“Weather is very, very complicated” said Evelyn. “Otherwise, if it wasn't so complicated, every Tom, Dick and Harry would be forecasting it.