There are some concepts for which only the Germans seem to have a word. Weltschmerz and Schadenfreude, for example, require a paragraph or two if those feelings are to be described in all their subtlety, and the nuances of Zeitgeist, Ersatz and our ever-present Angst are almost untranslatable. This last has a compound form which describes exactly how a meteorologist feels when he or she has made a tricky forecast: Zukunftsangst is an unsettling feeling that is something more than just concern, but rather less than an anxiety, about the future. The problem is that now and then a tricky forecast goes completely wrong.
To some degree, a certain Zukunftsangst is the inevitable companion of anyone who attempts prediction of our Irish weather. We live in a region with a very changeable regime, so that forecast conditions will almost invariably be very different from those experienced at present. We are disadvantaged, too, in being on the western edge of Europe: most of our weather approaches from the west over a vast expanse of ocean from which not many weather observations are available, and it is all too easy for sudden, unobserved developments to take one unawares.
There should, paradoxically, be less Angst about the Zukunft for meteorologists in Germany, since approaching weather systems there can be accurately followed as they move eastwards across Ireland, England and all the other countries in between.
But there are other factors, too, that place infallibility beyond our grasp. First of all there are the uncertainties in assessing the existing state of the atmosphere at any time. The picture is built up from observations of temperature, pressure and humidity made at places perhaps 100 miles apart. The forecaster's impression of the atmosphere is more a Renoir than a Rembrandt; the picture has a certain fuzziness, and many a quirk may not be visible for lack of detail.
And there are also limits to our knowledge of the processes that shape our weather, and the extent to which it can be transformed into the equations used by a computer. These mathematical descriptions of the behaviour of the atmosphere are not exact; they are approximations - and therefore future developments predicted by the computer may well be under- or over-estimated. And even if the pressure pattern and the positions of the fronts are found to be exactly right, subjective skills are called upon to estimate the amount and thickness of the cloud, the gustiness of wind, or the heaviness or persistence of the rain.
The cumulative and inevitable result of these uncertainties is Zukunftsangst.
