Summer 2024 - General Discussion

In your neck of the woods? We had 9 days above 20c in Cork last Sept. Trace rainfall too and plenty of blue skies.

horrendous.

Mayo.

Feels wilder than anything we had last winter tonight in Galway - wind is howling outside and my cherry blossom tree is bending over in the wind.

I could be wrong but was it 4 days in a row of temperatures of over 25° last September at some Met stations in the Greater Dublin Area/East, with the Met Eireann definition of heatwave being 5 days or more of temperatures above 25° at a Met Éireann station.

Link:

As far as I am aware, there were some inland Met Eireann that breached 25° for up to 6 days in a row in early September last year. So my apologies if you are living in the eastern half of the country but well inland where heatwave conditions did indeed occur ☺️

Think there were a few days early in May of sun but not the heat you'd hope for in the Summer...June bank holiday was decent as well but overall pretty disappointing

Yeah, I could only realistically go with data from official Met Eireann stations as it's verified, and none of the 3 Dublin stations (Dublin Airport, Casement Aerodrome & Phoenix Park) reached heatwave criteria as they did not get 5 days in a row of above 25°. Dunsany in Meath did not meet the criteria either, nor did Mullingar, although Mount Dillon (just west of Longford town, on the Roscommon side of the border) and Oak Park (Carlow) did. And there are others apart from the ones I mentioned.

Looking at the table below for Casement (slightly west of Dublin city), you can see it was nearing the first day of a possible heatwave on the 4th but it didn't quite get there, some other inland stations began their heatwave on the 4th and with Clane being about 15km inland/west of Casement, it's quite plausible that 25° was exceeded there that day. However, Casement had a much lower maximum the following day (despite 7.5 hours of sunshine) so I had a look at the wind data and there was a noticeable breeze from the east on the 5th along eastern areas so that would likely have led to the cooler conditions on that day. If the sea breeze led to a max of 21.1° at Casement on the 5th, I would doubt that the wind would have warmed to 25° or more by the time it reached Clane, especially as the mean wind speed in the early to mid afternoon was around 20-25 km/h. I lived about 15km NNW of Clane until a few years ago and with weather conditions like those on the 5th September 2023, I would begin to feel a slight cooling of the breeze from around lunchtime, resulting in a day that would have been several degrees warmer had the sea breeze not reached me.

The wind on following days at Casement was either lighter, not from the east or a combination of both, hence the much warmer weather again. This was combined with the air mass in general being very warm, resulting in a max of 25.6° on the 7th, despite only 90 minutes of sunshine for the entire day. And just to clarify, the warm air vamoosed on the 10th……it was still warm for the time of year in many places but the heatwave ended everywhere in Ireland on the 9th, unless someone can correct me.

In an effort to try find approximate conditions for the Clane area, I had a look at Wunderground. For some reason, I'm getting incorrect and repetitive historical data for the two non-Met stations in Clane. So I found a station which is showing data that looks to be as OK as can be. This station is just under 8km SW of Clane (and about 2km SW of Mondello race track, for reference), so it would have even more benefit of a sea breeze having warmed up that little bit more, being that bit further inland. As a result, I would expect temperatures to be generally a few degrees warmer than Casement in this setup. The daily conditions for this station are shown below (different format, I'm afraid):

So although this station is further inland than Clane, it still only got to 23° on the 5th, resulting in only 4 days above 25° after that so not a heatwave. The 23° max on the 5th compares well with the corresponding 21.1° max at Casement, over 20km to the ENE, in terms of the sea breeze warming as it travels overland but it also leads me to believe that I think it's very unlikely that the Clane area (or most places within about 50km of the east coast that are not in the lee of substantial hill or mountain ranges) on the 5th of September 2023. For pig iron, I checked the data for a non-official weather station in Edenderry (about 55km from the Irish Sea and about 25km WNW of Clane) and it has a reported max of 24.8 for that day which seems about right for the weather conditions that day.