'Glimmer' of hope for improved weather for the Fleadh

Climate scientist and weather analyst, Cathal Nolan of Ireland's Weather Channel, says conditions look to pick-up, albeit slightly, in time for Fleadh Cheoil na hEireann which gets underday on Sunday August 6.

"For the next week or so, we don't expect to see a significant pick-up in our conditions," he admits.

"We see a continuation of westerly winds, unsettled conditions and heavy rain at times, interspersed by some drier, brighter days, and feeling a little bit more summery on those occasions," he begins.

"As we get closer to the Fleadh itself however, towards the end of the first week of August, we do expect a slight pick-up in conditions.

"There are signs that the high pressure begins to build from the south-west at that point in time, so I would still hold out hope that we will see drier conditions, something more akin to summer throughout the course of the fleadh, and then potentially leading on to better conditions as we progress further into August."

Nolan adds that the previous statement comes with a "caveat" however;

"As it is beyond the seven to ten day period whereby we have accuracy for such forecasts, it's still a case of checking in with the models, but the long-term trends are certainly pointing in that direction so that in itself is a positive," he states.

Cathal explains that Ireland is currently on "the wrong side of the Jet Stream", leading to our wetter than average, summer.

"The jet stream, the upper air current which typically dictates our weather in Ireland on a day-to-day basis, we have been on the north side of that for the last while.

"The jet stream itself is very weak at the moment and when it gets weak it tends to meander and when that happens we can get stuck in a pattern. If you're lucky you get high pressure as happened during the summer of 2018, and we had fabulous conditions - heatwave conditions, drought conditions but I suppose for the most, we had a fabulous summer.

"That's not been the case this year. We've been stuck under a continuous area of low pressure, leading to, at times, some very strong thunderstorms, localised flooding and in general, wetter and cooler conditions than we would typically expect for an Irish summer.

"By contrast then, southern Europe has been under that dome of heat leading to those heatwaves and wildfires. If we could find some kind of balance between the two it would be ideal, but that doesn't seem to exist at the moment."