Today is the first day of Spring, though you might be forgiven for thinking that it had arrived already. It has been a mild winter and, as a result, flowers have bloomed quite early compared to previous years. The daffodil in the picture above was photographed in mid-March. This year, the first daffodil in the same part of my garden has been in bloom since last week (along with some of my crocuses). Last week, after our hike at Leenaun, the thermometer in my car showed an outside temperature of 14 degrees Celcius in late afternoon. From memory, it feels like there has just been one or two mornings since Xmas where there was any frost at all in Galway.
Out of curiosity, I went to the Central Statistics Office website to look at monthly temperatures to see if this January was abnormal. The stats only shows mean temperature per month, and, as you can see, this year isn’t particularly mild compared to other recent years. The dip in the graph reflects the very cold winter of 2010, when there was a lot of snow. I’ve also removed the two years for when there was no data for January(1989 and 2001). The CSO data only runs to 2011, so I retrieved the Jan figures for years 2013 – 2016 from the Met Eireann website.
If you want to play around with the data for the full year, it’s available below. The fields highlighted in yellow denote months with no data available.