Blame it on the weatherman

Now before you flee at the prospect of a list of cloud formations or other such riveting meteorological phenomena let me reassure you that I’m just going to be dealing with the myths, stories and folklore that arise from the weather. This is because this week I was enlightened as to the biblical significance of the rainbow: God sent the rainbow to Noah as promise that he wouldn’t be repeating the whole flooding of the world episode.

Most people would probably be more familiar with the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow story and I couldn’t for the life of me find out where the myth of the leprechaun’s gold actually comes from. Everyone agrees it’s Irish, obviously, and there seems to be a general consensus that the point is that it’s unattainable as you can never reach the end of a rainbow. Aside from that though it just looks like Celtic lunacy.

In the village where my parents live there’s an indeterminately old man who always knows what the weather is going to be like. I like to think he’s somehow inherently attuned to nature but presumably he’s just been around so long that he knows the signs. The point of this is that one of his guaranteed weather predicting phrases is "Red sky at night, shepherd’s delight. Red sky in the morning, shepherd’s warning". Now I have since heard this in reference to sailors but I’m guessing nautical trips are not of that much interest to an old man in rural Oxfordshire, so we’ll stick with shepherds.

The best thing about this phrase is that it does actually have a meteorological basis. A red sunset is caused by the sinking sun’s rays scattering through the lower levels of the atmosphere which contain dust, salt, smoke and pollution. Most of our weather systems approach from the west where the sun is setting and high pressure approaching from this direction holds the contaminants near the earth making the sunset red. If, however, the horizon is red in the morning this means that the area of high pressure, and thus the good weather, have passed by overnight and an area of low pressure may follow.

If you haven’t got an old man nearby though, you might have to turn your attention to the animal kingdom for help with weather forecasting. Cows are said to lie down if it’s going to rain. Bees will apparently keep close to the hive and spiders will leave their webs. Cats will clean themselves more and insects will fly lower and bite more. If you see a squirrel with a particularly bushy tail then you should prepare for a cold winter. But by far my favourite, and taken from the MET office website, is: "A sunshiny shower, won't last half an hour". Sounds about right to me.

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