Is there ever a year with "normal" weather? There certainly never seems to be as every year, no matter how near to the "norm" or long term average it may be, has the ability to throw up the interesting oddity which proves that chaos rather than order prevails where weather is concerned. Such was the case in 1999 when mean annual temperature, at just over eight degrees Centigrade, was right on the average for the last twenty years. Nevertheless, we had one of the warmest days on record in North Sutherland on August 29th. when the mercury touched 27.9 degrees centigrade, a figure you would have to go back to the 4th. August 1982 to better in the coastal zone though Altnaharra, in a special situation a few miles inland, may have equalled it on one or two occasions. Equally remarkable was the absence of damaging frost with six completely frost free months and an overall low of only minus three point four degrees Centigrade on the 22nd. of May which contrasts with the thirty year low of minus thirteen on the nineteenth of February 1978 which caused considerable damage to water pipes all over Sutherland and Caithness, not to mention frostbite to the author's big toe. (He was, foolishly, hillwalking at the time.)
Also remarkable in 1999 has been the almost total absence of damaging winds, although a gust of one hundred and one miles per hour was recorded in Achina in February. Now in France, as we have seen recently, this would have made the headlines in every news bulletin but in Bettyhill, hardly anyone noticed! August, with an average windspeed of five point five miles per hour, was remarkably calm while October, at just over twelve m.p.h. was really pretty breezy although it pales in to insignificance compared to December 1986 at seventeen point five m.p.h. and January 1989 at a startling twenty one point five. According to the Hydro Board, or whatever they are currently designated, the incidence of damaging winds has declined significantly during the 1990s. In spite of this, and their huge investment in strengthening of their lines, their outage time has remained at a disappointing level. Modern outage has been caused by an increase in lightning strikes which has inversely matched the decrease in damaging winds and accounts for a significant proportion of the sudden power cuts which have occurred in recent years. The Hydro have set up a working party to look in to this phenomenon and have devised some cunning ploys to counter it, including radio controlled resetting of remote transformers which has helped keep outage to a minimum.
The decrease in damaging gales is surprising as, especially in recent days, there have been depressions of considerable magnitude and some remarkable lows, including one of just under nine hundred and fifty millibars at Bettyhill on Christmas Day. Further north, the low was even deeper with a minimum pressure of nine hundred and forty four point four millibars recorded at the Observatory in Lerwick at ten to seven on Christmas morning. While the pressure gradient inherent in this very large and deep depression did give rise to some very nasty conditions elsewhere, North Sutherland was relatively unaffected except by an extraordinarily high tide, influenced, perhaps, by the proximity of the moon (at its nearest for 134 years) as well as by general weather conditions and the lifting effect of the atmospheric low, which led to cut-back along dune fronts all along the coast. This was, fortunately, insufficient to release the decaying sperm whale which had been interred in the dune front at Farr Bay a few months earlier otherwise, Christmas dinner in Bettyhill could have developed an altogether less attractive aroma!
Where rainfall was concerned, the annual total reached one thousand one hundred and thirteen millimetres, the highest since 1990, which had around one thousand two hundred and eight millimetres, and about eighteen percent above the twenty year average of nine hundred and thirty nine millimetres of accumulated dampness, making the year that's awa the second wettest since 1976. This has been reflected in a high water table, very muddy conditions underfoot, and the appearance of small lochans and ponds where muddy hollows are the norm.
Despite being apparently dull and damp, 1999 has exceeded the long term average where sunshine is concerned. Just over one thousand one hundred and ninety hours of burning sun were recorded, more than one hundred and fifty hours more than average, and you would have to go back to 1982 to find a sunnier year though, at one thousand one hundred and fifty four hours, 1990 came close. Within the year, we had the sunniest January on record with forty three point one hours and the sunniest August since 1984 with one hundred and thirty five point nine hours compared to one hundred and sixty two in that record breaking year.
Nineteen ninety nine, then, was a fairly ordinary year, give or take a few extraordinary features. How did it compare to the other years of the twentieth century and, looking further back, to all the years of the second millennium? North Sutherland has, of course, been settled by man not just for the last millennium but for at least five millennia and man's imprint on the land may well go back even further than that if we had the capacity to discern it. Our ancestors have observed and reacted to the weather throughout that time and, for much of it, have been far more subject to its vagaries than we are currently. Today an unusually cold spring or an extraordinarily wet autumn are inconveniences to us but, in the past, they could mean life or death. Our ancestors did not have the means to record the weather scientifically and weather records for this area in the past are scantly to say the least. However, past conditions may be inferred from historical records and from scientific techniques such as pollen analysis, some of which has been carried out in the North. The second millennium began well, with two or three centuries of relatively benign weather which allowed the Norsemen to expand, not just in to our area, where their place names are still extant, but to the even more uncertain climates of Iceland and Greenland where thriving colonies were established. Indeed, the 12th. and 13th. centuries, like our own century, are thought to have been the warmest of the last thousand years. The so called Mediaeval Warm Period was over in the North before it was over in England and from then on it was downhill for several centuries with a particular trough of miserable conditions in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a period now known as the "Little Ice Age". During this time winters were much more severe than they have been of late and years of famine were common. Population fell in many areas and, long before the Clearances, large groups of Highlanders, including some from Strathnaver, left to seek opportunity elsewhere. It was only in the mid-nineteenth century that climatic conditions began to improve and have continued to improve, with one or two hiccups, until the present day.
What of the next millennium? The conventional wisdom is that we are in the grip of global warming and that, until we have used up all the earth's stored up fossil fuel and cut down its remaining forests, temperatures will increase at a fairly rapid rate with unpredictable consequences for us and our descendants. The best guess seems to be that, while Southern England becomes more and more Mediterranean, Northern Scotland will become warmer, windier and wetter. But, that is not the only possible scenario. Another quite plausible one has to do with the flow of the North Atlantic Drift or Gulf Stream which, at present, bathes our shores and keeps our winter temperatures extraordinarily mild for the latitude we inhabit. The bad news is that this flow is now proven to be susceptible to considerable, and sudden, fluctuations which, if they were to come in to operation, could change our climate dramatically in the space of a few decades or, if some scientists are to be believed, within a few years. Effectively, we would swop climates with Labrador and suddenly find ourselves with real winters such as our Canadian cousins currently suffer. That may not materialise within our lifetimes but, global warming or not, we probably won't have seen the last of snowy winters. Some meteorologists believe that there exists a twenty two to twenty three year cycle of bad winters which affects Western Europe. The next one is due in 2007/8. It will be interesting to see if it really happens - in the meantime, as always, we will just have to take it as it comes.
Jim A. Johnston would like to thank Mr. Robert Mackay of Strathy and Mr. George Macintosh of Bettyhill for the local statistics on which this article is based. Longer term local statistics are from the twenty year dataset built up by Major LCS Spray of Skerray.
Photo:
Snowy conditions on the road to Skelpick - a taste of things to come?