Summer 2024 - General Discussion

This! I'm baffled by posts about the weather being dry. We've been plagued by heavy rain here in Tralee since the brief fine spell broke down on Friday 28th. Not constant, but I don't think there has been a single dry day since that date and the showers and longer rain spells are very heavy. Here the ground is drenched and my patio flowers, despite my best efforts, are rotting from all the wet. So far it's dry today and I'm taking my chances with a line of washing out, but the sky doesn't look good.

I know last July was atrocious but so far, imo, this July is pretty much its equal and it's definitely colder. Splitting hairs to say which is marginally better or worse.

The bar is very low indeed. We're cursed with a miserable climate of really poor summers and there is no denying that.

Strange, the soil here in west Mayo is extremely dry, ground is rock hard.

Anyways, the charts have all flipped again overnight, lol, couldn't care less any more, passed the point where it doesn't even matter. Complete joke.

Every morning the forecast changes.

But of course the US West coast got their heat dome as expected, which was forecast 2 weeks ago.

Since May 1st "only" 71.6mm of rain has fallen here (Dublin Apt data). You'd expect ~137mm by now. Only 52% of average. Quite dry

2018 however had just 23.9mm in the same period, 17% of the average.

Indeed evaporative rates are far greater at this time of year that a run of low humidity, sunny days (which have the highest evaporation) can lose a lot of moisture in a short period of time that it doesn't matter if there had been a lot of wet weather prior. Not discounting local variation which happens, the soil moisture deficits don't exactly ring alarm bells for me. Most SMDs range between 20 and 45mm currently, exceptions are Valentia/Malin Head which are almost negative SMD so these places have been rather wet of late. This is confirmed by the stats where Malin Head had 30.9mm in the past 7 days, 177% of what it expects in a typical week at this time of year. Valentia has been near average with 21.8mm (98%) but this is the wettest station in the country. Dublin Airport is the other exception which is showing a deficit of 58mm, significantly above anywhere else. I can attest to this as there hasn't been much rain here as already mentioned.

I think as a result, talking of parched soils is a bit grossly exaggerated and premature. If we were seeing widespread SMDs above 70mm then it'd be a different story.

Remember the hosepipe bans of 2018 and 2020? Summer 2017 to mid-spring 2018 was quite a wet period as was summer 2019 to winter 2019-20. Yet hosepipe bans were issued because SMDs reached record highs in places and we had historic "flash droughts" statistically through spring 2020 and summer 2018. However, they don't compare to now. What we have now is much more normal unless we see a flip in the weather patterns and start getting a few weeks of very sunny and very dry weather.

Great day in Sligo Sunny all day. 16c . Blue skies. Fcuk the temperatures if its sunny. Might be a cool night though. 6 or 7c

Today turned out very nice in Tralee, a first nice, sunny day since the brief fine spell nearly 2 weeks ago. What a difference it makes! I'm prepared to go abroad for my doses of heat and sun, so once I get it dry and reasonably mild at home, like today, I can live with that. But constant rain, I just can't live with.

Nice day here in Mayo , showers about but dodged them here and nice and warm in the sunshine and light winds.

it’s July that’s cold for July