A Bewick's Swan, presumably not the Bewick's Swan that is responsible for recent weather headlines. EMPICS Sports Photo Agency EMPICS Sports Photo Agency

YOU MIGHT HAVE noticed the media focusing on the habits of a swan not many people would have paid much attention to before.

The Bewick swan migrated from Siberia to the United Kingdom earlier this year than it has in the last 50 years, arriving 25 days ahead of schedule and prompting The Telegraph to warn that this means a long winter for Britain.

Due to our proximity to our neighbours, that means Ireland could be in for some nasty weather as well.

But these headlines appear each and every year, often sourced from predictions made by private forecasting companies, and grab our attention – we all want to know if we’ll be having a white Christmas.

Met Éireann has absolutely no time for this kind of long-range forecast, dismissing the reports each year.

“It’s crystal ball gazing,” Met Eireann spokesperson Hugh Daly said.

Our climate is just so changeable. Forecasting that far in advance is mostly nonsensical guesswork.

“There is some experimental seasonal forecasting,” Daly noted, “This might give a vague indication of whether the temperature over a large area will be a degree above or below average, but that’s no use for planning or making decisions.”

Like other meteorologists, Daly isn’t too impressed with predictions of a cold winter, calling it “irresponsible”.

We often get calls from frightened pensioners, asking if the reports are true and if they’ll be okay.

The forecaster’s scepticism aside, there are some weather patterns or environmental conditions that have been linked to future weather events. For example, the strength of El Niño gives some indication of what the weather will be like in certain parts of the world.

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Some of these ‘building blocks’ are in place to suggest how the winter will turn out, as the founder of Irish Weather Online Mark Dunphy noted.

Dunphy, also editor of The Clare Herald, noted four factors right now:

• “Record-breaking cold sea surface temperatures in the North Atlantic.”
• “Entrenched early season cold in Russia and soon Eastern Europe.”
• “A strong El Niño (likely to finish as second or third strongest since 1950).”
• “Periods of high pressure blocking in recent weeks dragging in a polar continental air mass across Ireland and Britain.”

But does that really mean we know how things will turn out? Nope.

“Strong El Niños and cold Atlantic waters have come and gone without record breaking cold occurring in this part of the world in the past,” Dunphy wrote in The Clare Herald.

For example, the strong El Nino year of 1991-92 winter season saw October to May in Ireland and Britain producing warmer than average conditions.

This uncertainty doesn’t stop some meteorologists forecasting the future – and, occasionally, with some success.

Piers Corbyn of WeatherAction (and brother of one Jeremy Corbyn) predicted that harsh weather in 2010, while Joe Bastardi of WeatherBELL correctly forecasted when Hurricane Sandy would form and where it would make landfall.