You may have noticed an interesting weather snippet in the Business Section of your Irish Times last week. It told us that Weather Action has gone public.
When this private weather company, run by astrophysicist Piers Corbyn from the South Bank University, in London, was floated on the stock exchange, the price of its shares, apparently, rose from 79p on issue to close at 90p. Naturally, Dr Corbyn will be pleased.
Weather Action produces weather forecasts for several months ahead using a methodology which they call the "solar weather technique". It is apparently based on the not implausible assumption that erratic variations in the energy output of the sun affect our climate.
Mainstream meteorologists, however, look askance at such techniques. Despite years of research, the only link they have found between solar activity and the behaviour of the atmosphere involves the so-called quasi-biennial oscillation - a periodic reversal of wind direction in the high stratosphere which has tentatively been found to be related to the 11-year cycle of sunspots.
The accepted wisdom is that the relationship between solar output and our weather week by week is tenuous in the extreme - so tenuous that any attempt to use it for long-range forecasting must be doomed to failure.
Dr Corbyn, however, is undeterred by these official sceptics. Indeed, he has turned his prediction scheme into a nice little earner by providing long-range forecasts to insurance companies who want to indemnify themselves against catastrophic happenings; to utility companies wishing to predict future energy demands; and to supermarkets who want to anticipate the requirement for weather-sensitive products next season on their shelves.
And these customers, says Dr Corbyn, are happy.
The exact details of the solar weather technique remain a closely-guarded secret. Dr Corbyn, very understandably, feels that his methods will be hijacked if he tells us what they are and that his customers will then have the opportunity to go elsewhere.
All he will say is that 13 years ago, while studying the processes of galaxy formation, he stumbled across a connection between sun-spots and our weather.
It is believed that he assesses the output of the sun in all its forms - electromagnetic radiation, particle emission and magnetic forces - but how exactly he relates these variables to the daily movement of depressions across the north Atlantic no one knows.
He has promised, however, that all will be revealed eventually: then perhaps we may think as Dr Watson did that "like all Holmes's reasoning, the thing seemed simplicity itself when it was once explained".