Predicting weather from the moon

By Andy Doyle

The name Ken Ring and his company, Predict Weather, have become relatively well-known in Ireland over the past 12 months or so. Ken is involved in long-term forecasting using non-conventional meteorological methods. Earlier this year, he predicted that we would have a wet summer, but that it would turn dry after 7 September. How is this possible?

Ken Ring is based in New Zealand and predicts weather by the orbits of the sun and moon. For the past three years, he has been a long-range weather consultant for Channel 7, the largest television network in Australia.

Ken has also been on a number of radio stations here in Ireland. While many local and British meteorologists suggested in springtime that we would have 'a barbecue summer' and 'a summer to remember', 14,000 miles away, Ken Ring predicted a mostly wet season, with the best of summer weather beginning in the second week of September.

gravitational pull

Ken's working principle is that there are air tides just as there are ocean tides. Because of its proximity to us, the moon has 2.5 times the gravitational pulling power of the sun. The moon pulls water, but cannot know where the water is, nor can it tell water from anything else that can be pulled, like air, the earth's crust or its molten inner core.

Huge lunar forces go through the air to get to earth, which means everything that can move is subject to tidal action, including the atmosphere. Our air sits on, and moves with the ocean's surface currents, causing the world's wind systems. Ocean and air are joined at the hip, and so weather systems recycle in a similar way to tides.

Moon cycles

The moon does several things at once, and can be likened to a short person running around you each day throughout a month. As he encircles you, he seems to change shape. That's the cycle we see and call 'changing phase', from new to full moon and back to new moon.

In a second cycle, the person's orbit is above your eye level for half the month, and below your feet for the other half. This is called 'declination'. These relative positions gradually precess backwards from month to month.

On a third and separate cycle, this orbiting person comes closer to you then drifts further away. The change of earth-moon distance, called 'perigee' has a larger cycle, that of changing hemispheres once every 8.85 years.

Sometimes, the three main cycles of phase, declination and perigee, peak together, and peak times can result in extreme weather. Still an inexact science, this long-range approach is maybe not exact to the day, but useful as a window on weather trends and extreme events coming in the future.

When the various lunar phenomena are evenly distributed throughout the month, there are more even weather patterns. But when two or more of these rhythms come into phase with each other in a way that is more extreme, and the tides are bigger, not only are there wind and storm surges, but also greater growth surges in plants.

There is evidence that the ancients knew about this, and the body of knowledge about gardening by the moon was developed at the time agriculture itself began. From this grew the science of astrology, initially for an efficient horticultural calendar. All early economies were based on agriculture, so people needed a system of predictive planning around it. They erected stone circles, which were virtually laptops of the day, being weather, climate and extreme event calculators. All stone circles seem to be aligned to the moon.

Moon and solar

The moon day of moonrise to moonset and moonrise again is about 24 hours and 50 minutes long. When the moon is well below the horizon, you can notice a tendency to cloud formation because the clouds lower and the water vapour condenses.

But, when the moon is above the horizon, the skies are more likely to clear as the air goes into its high tide. You'll also see some rapid changes, either fast-gathering of cloud or increased gusts of wind when the moon is on the horizon. Even some animal behaviours change. Moonrise leads to increased metabolic activity in plants, algae and earthworms.

There also seems to be a regular solar day rhythm of expansion and contraction, which brings changes in atmospheric pressure. From 3am to 3pm, it is as though the earth is exhaling, so you often get mists rising. From 3pm to 3am, there's a contraction and an inhalation, and you may get dew falling. If you were working in harmony with this rhythm, you could harvest herbs early in the morning when plant vitality is still contained and not breathed out with the earth, and transplant in the evening, when the plant has regathered itself.

When the moon swings closer to Earth, in perigee, on its 27 day cycle, and if this coincides with a new or full moon, water pulsations can be stronger. A situation can be too strong, and if two or more of these rhythms come together when conditions are already wet, you can expect high incidence of rotting and fungal attacks. You may also expect big swells and very high tides, a high risk of rain, and a better chance of bulkier plant growth. Plants such as beans, potatoes, carrots, radishes and rye planted at perigee are said to give higher yields.

Weather and air - chicken or egg?

Meteorologists claim that weather comes from the air. Ken points out that weather comes first and influences the air. Air, he says, is blown around by weather. There is weather on other planets, but no air, and weather movements are caused by the tidal energies from sun and the moon, not by recycling plastic bags and by more people walking or cycling to work.

There are tidal forces even where there is no water. These are geomagnetic and these forces can be picked up by creatures like migrating or mating crabs, birds and insects.

Most planets that have moons have weather, like Mars and Jupiter and Pluto. Because weather does not come from the air, Ken claims that pollutant impurities put into the air should not alter weather patterns any more than ink poured into the sea would change the tides.

Besides, anything put into the air originally came from the air. Carbon dioxide is the breath of life to plants. Plants add a molecule of water to a CO2 molecule to produce a carbohydrate -- the building block of life. An oxygen molecule is ejected as a by-product of photosynthesis.

sceptic

Ken is a sceptic of human-induced climate change. Pollution is not climate. Weather conditions happening now have happened before. Nature recycles.

The ocean has never warmed so much that it boiled and evaporated away, nor did it freeze to a block of ice. The ice caps have never expanded to cover the world, nor contracted until there was nothing left. The sea level never rose to cover all the land nor decreased til all water disappeared.

Ken suggests that modern western politics seem to be trying to distance us from the old way of viewing nature as a system of cycles, because there are more taxation opportunities in blaming people for outcomes rather than blaming providence.

Picture Above:While many were forecasting a dry warm summer during early spring, Ken Ring said that it would be wet but that the weather would pick up in early September, and it did, just in time for the harvest.