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Irish Report
Fri Apr 23, 2004
Listen in RealAudio 
Hi, I'm Bryan Yeaton, and this is The Weather Notebook. Our correspondent, Chuck
Kruger, has sent in a weather report from his little Irish island.
CK: On Cape Clear, the southernmost island off the south coast of Ireland, the weather
of 2003 -- surprise, surprise -- held no major surprises. No wild Atlantic winds
whipped slates off roofs, or sent waves over the tops of piers and low-lying houses, or
transformed meandering 12-foot wide harbor roads into white-water rivers. We had no
serious hurricanes, no torrential downpours, no snowfalls, though occasionally, we
could see a dusting of snow on the tops of a few of the mountains north of us in
western County Cork. For the bulk of our tourists and for all our farmers, the summer
weather obliged, a gentle, slightly dry season. Heathrow, at exactly the same 51st
latitude and roughly 400 miles to the east of us, may have hit a record 100 degrees
Fahrenheit, but we never went over 80. And for some odd reason, despite a minimal
amount of rainfall -- about seven inches total for June, July, and August -- our garden
didn't suffer from drought, nor did we ever lose our water supply. A rambunctious
spring gale may have whipped off the apple blossoms, so that we had not a single
apple this year compared to bushels-full from our three small trees last year, but
otherwise the garden was prolific, even to the extent of our harvesting pumpkins and
American sweet corn through October, and broccoli into December: a first. One of
these years, though, we must remember to organically spray the potato haulms before
the first of those infrequent but blanketing summer fogs arrive.
The Weather Notebook is produced thanks to funding from the National Science
Foundation and Subaru, Driven by What's Inside. Thanks also to Executive Engineer
Sean Doucette.
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