How Ireland's weather follows a wider pattern of climate change
Ireland will experience a wetter, warmer, stormier future as a result of climate change, according to the latest assessments. Flooding along some river valleys and the coastline are also on the cards.
The Community Climate Change Consortium for Ireland (C4I) was set up in Met Éireann in 2003 to help advise Government and other bodies on what our climatic future holds, explains the head of C4I and of Met Éireann's research and applications division, Ray McGrath.
International global climate models run at centres such as the Hadley Centre for Climate Change in Exeter study changes in gross detail, with a resolution of between 100 and 300 km, McGrath explains. "It is fairly course-grained information but is good for giving a general idea of what is happening."
C4I takes this data and then "dynamically downscales the information" using modified weather forecasting models that can deliver a resolution of between 10 and 15km, he says. This provides a much better idea of what we can expect at a local level in the future.
But what does the model tell us?
"It is saying that our climate is warming up and is very much in agreement with what the global model is saying," McGrath states.
Locally this warming is likely to outpace the global average, with heavier winter rainfall, particularly in the west and northwest. Summer rainfall will diminish however, particularly in the east.
Flooding is another major worry, he suggests. "We are running ocean models that will look at flooding along our coasts." Rising ocean levels will be matched by more frequent and probably more intense storms which will gnaw at our coasts to cause erosion but also send heavier storm surges.
Some river systems are at particular risk, he suggests, such as the Suir. Heavier rains will swell river systems, and storm surges will back-up the water flow to cause more frequent flooding.
"There is still a lot of work to be done to fill in the gaps at the local level," he says. This means climate modelling efforts will continue.
Irish efforts such as C4I, which is funded by the Met service, Sustainable Energy Ireland, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Higher Education Authority in conjunction with University College Dublin, will join with others.
These include the Irish Climate Analysis and Research Units (Icarus) at NUI Maynooth and the wider Ensembles programme run by the EU. The latter involves bodies such as C4I based in other member states that pool predictions to provide a more accurate picture of how climate over Europe might change in the future.