Weather

Here is a selection of the slides shown at the talk on Walking in Winter at the WAI meet held on March 24th last.

Walking in snow-bound Ireland. A point of view from a Scottish member of MountainViews.ie.

Here is a bunch of opinions on safety in winter. Winter walking is immensely fun and mostly safe. The three Scottish deaths so far this winter have been of experienced people in extreme places, so avoid extreme places. Winter skills are best picked up from people who know. Skilled friends are great and there's lots of good courses available in Scotland. However most of us learn by our mistakes so heres a few pointers.

The following page has an interesting reference table on wind-chill. This is the perceived reduction in temperature caused by wind. If you take a typical day on the Irish hills as having a windspeed of 30 km/h then at an air temperature of 5 Celsius (very typical for winter uplands) you would perceive it to be around 0.

It seems that as the temperature drops and the wind rises the effect can be disproportionately greater. At an air temperature of -5 Celsius and wind speed of 50 km/h (only 30 mph in imperial) the perceived temperature is -15.

John let us know about the helpful annamoe.net site which has details of weather conditions in ... well... Annemoe Co. Wicklow.

There are a number of other enthusiasts running similar sites in Wicklow that I'm aware of (courtesy of boards.ie)

Arklow Weather
Roundwood
Ashford