Spring 2024 - General Discussion

Maybe you should take your church reference to the Christianity forum pal.

😉

Dull, grey, cool and breezy in Trim, Meath, with occasional outbreaks of light rain.

Interesting to read about wintry precipitation in parts of the southwest. Three cameras to maybe keep an eye on are:

#1 is in the Rathduff townland on the N20, just east of Grenagh village, at an elevation of just under 150m, with some land towards the west and east rising to above 200m. TII is reporting a temperature of 2° there with SSE breeze.

#2 is in the Ballyvourney area of the N22, at an elevation of just over 200m but with many hills all around. I checked a few minutes ago and it looked to be raining but it has just transitioned to what looks like very wet snow.

#3 is also on the N22 but this time on the Macroom to Cork City section, in the general area of Ryecourt. The camera is located at only about 50m ASL however the hill in the background rises to about 200m, with the area visible in the photo probably rising to around 160m, at a guess.

Update, camera #1 at Rathduff on the N20 is now reporting a temperature of 0° with what looks like moderate wet snow falling with the slightest of accumulations on the grass.

Camera #2 on the N22 near Ballyvourney also looks to have moderate wet snow but with slightly more in the way off accumulations due to it being at higher elevation and also because it is surrounded by relatively high ground. The temperature is still reporting an obviously incorrect 12°!

The strange thing , without deflecting the thread. When discussing cycle lanes and the bombardment of new ones , a few of our regular posters argue that the amount of wet weather we get in Ireland is totally exaggerated , wtf.

Rear of our house is very open to the elements and walls , patio etc covered in algae from incessant wet weather.

Springtime sunshine in Limerick at the moment but jet black clouds on the way.

If we're speeding it up though, that gives the potential for even more rain because higher temps = more moisture available of which we've been seeing the effects of that since September 2022 🤨

I'm nearly afraid to ask but what's Paris going to be like next week?

Going to Disneyland with the kids, all I want is a bit of dry weather!

Variation does and will always happen. For instance, February 2023 was very dry and the May/June 2023 spell was one of the most prolonged for a large number of years for different places (Dublin Airport had its longest absolute drought since 1955 as one example!). However, the trend since September 2022 has been much wetter than average conditions persisting including the wettest October on national record (2022), the wettest March on national record (2023) and the wettest July on national record (2023) all occurring in this time. That is a lot of national monthly records for what is a relatively small climatological timeframe of 10 months between the 3.

Now as you know, our Met doesn't make things easy in being able to access national stats that would prove useful in a discussion like this. The best I have to offer is an Irish rainfall series I one day made for a post on here and interest sakes to compare how wet or dry a month was across the nation and single out backyard bias. It only goes back to 2009 so is not very useful in being able to see effects of CC. When you initially look at this graph, the recent wet period doesn't exactly seem attention grabbing. After all, we've seen numerous spikes significantly greater than what we've seen like November 2009, December 2015 and February 2020 especially being the big outliers above 200mm. These are not necessarily evidence of what has changed though may have been intensified compared to years ago, that can only be hypothesised rather than concrete. One needs to look a bit closer and towards the end, there is a lack of short columns indicating a lack of dry months. This isn't entirely unique in the series - look at the second half of 2019 into early 2020 which was another notable consistently wet period. In fact, I think it's good to note that in the long-term England & Wales precipitation series (which goes back to 1766!) the two wettest 18-month periods on record there are September 2022-February 2024 and August 2019-January 2021. Could be complete coincidence or at least a little eye opening how the top 2 wettest have occurred so close together.

A huge player in the warm sea temperatures in the North Atlantic and subsequently likely this wet period too as an effect is the Hunga-Tonga eruption from January 2022 with all the excess water vapour that emitted.

The AMO is a variation on Atlantic sea temperatures and its existence has been questioned in recent years as a result of things like volcanic eruptions driving its variation rather than it being a natural oscillation. However, for the sake of this, it's the best thing to go by to visualise the sea temperatures over time. If we take the annual rainfall from the first graph below for Ireland from 1850-2015 and picture it overlayed on top of the AMO, we can see the variation making sense with what we've been told. Ireland's wetter years have tended to coincide with a warmer North Atlantic state (positive AMO) whilst drier periods have tended to coincide with a colder North Atlantic state (negative AMO). That's generally speaking the case - there are exceptions as always that may have been skewed by something else.

One other part of CC that may have impacted the recent exceptionally wet period is the frequency of above average heights to our south and southeast allowing those moisture laden southwesterlies to continue to blow for an even higher frequency than you'd expect. Reanalysis confirms this with a very ripe setup for Ireland southwesterly winds.

Anyway, I've done a lot of rambling for one day and will leave it there.

Roll on the next prolonged high pressure 😒