INTENSE HEAT IS on the way over this weekend and into next week as Met Éireann warns that climate change has increased the chance of temperature records being broken.
A high temperature advisory came into effect yesterday with the forecaster cautioning that daytime temperatures could exceed 30 degrees Celsius in some areas next week.
High temperatures tomorrow and Saturday are expected to range in the low to mid 20s, picking up steam in the following days to rise to mid to upper 20s on Sunday and possibly reaching the 30s on Monday.
The forecast for Tuesday isn’t certain yet but Met Éireann believes it will likely be another hot day – possibly as hot, if not hotter, than Monday.
The hot air also brings the chance of some bursts of thunder, particularly on Tuesday.
At night, some areas may experience a ‘tropical night’ on Sunday and Monday where temperatures do not fall below 20 degrees, with most of the country experiencing mid to high teens.
Ireland’s first tropical night in 20 years occurred in 2021, with only six recorded in digital record.
The high temperature advisory is set to remain in place until midnight on Wednesday, when cooler air is expected to come in from the west along with some wetter weather.
This period of hot weather is caused by a portion of the Azores High – an area of high atmospheric pressure – extending over Ireland for the weekend and interacting with a low pressure system off the coast of Portugal.
As the high pressure air moves clockwise and the low pressure air moves anticlockwise, the two will generate a strong surge of warm air that will be pushed northwards, bringing the airmass that caused a heatwave on the continent to Ireland.
While it is not unexpected for July to be one of the warmest months of the year, the climate crisis, which is unsettling weather patterns, increases the likelihood of extreme weather events like heatwaves.
As well as influencing their occurrence in the first place, it can make those events longer, more frequent, and more intense.
“While extremely hot weather does occur within natural climate variability, the kinds of temperature extremes we are seeing in Europe are directly influenced by climate change,” Met Éireann said in a statement.
“June 2022 was Europe’s 2nd warmest on record, and the USA’s warmest. The eight hottest Junes on record globally all occurred in the last eight years.”
Keith Lambkin, Head of Met Éireann’s Climate Services Division, said that “due to climate change, we are expecting to see heatwaves become longer, more frequent and intense than in the past”.
“This increase in heat increases the odds of temperature records being broken.”
Last July, Northern Ireland broke its highest temperature on record several times in one week.
The first half of this year has been marked by heatwaves and hot extremes in locations around the world.
In March and April, India and Pakistan recorded temperatures in the high 40s that far surpassed expectations for spring, while the Arctic and Antarctic recorded major temperature increases that were also far above the normal level for that time of year.
In mid-May and again in June, Spain was hit with hot weather that experts said was not uncommon in and of itself, but its early, intense onset was alarming.
China experienced its worst heatwave in decades this month after rainfall hit record levels in June, with similarly high temperatures in Japan.
And another heatwave swept across Europe this week, hitting France, Spain, Portugal, and the UK.
In 2021, temperatures in Ireland were above average for the 11th year in a row. Temperatures and sunshine were above average while rainfall was below.
The Copernicus Climate Change Service reported a record level of extreme weather last year, including the warmest summer and hottest day in Europe at 48.8C in Sicily, Italy.
A report by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change last year found that human-caused climate change is already affecting many weather and climate extremes across the entire globe.
Those extremes include events like heatwaves, floods, droughts and storms.
The IPCC said the scale of recent changes to the climate system is “unprecedented” over hundreds and thousands of years.
Human influence is the primary driver of global warming and “deep reductions” in greenhouse gas emissions are crucial to stop temperatures rising and prevent global catastrophes.
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