Hottest and coldest counties in Ireland

Donegal is cold and cloudy

Inland Southeast warmest like Carlow or Kilkenny but hottest temperatures in last heatwave were in the midlands

If you're basing it on current met stations probably Mount Dillon (Roscommon) has the biggest range from average winter lows to average summer highs.

I'd say Gurteen and Oak Park are two of the other top three in terms of min-max temp range.

Be interesting to see the stats though - as I'm just guessing!

Ovens Co. Cork 😀

Best climate in Ireland I'd go for Wicklow, fairly sunny, the mountains usually get a bit of snow in winter and can do fairly well inland during any warm spell. Rathdrum always struck me as a decent spot weatherwise there.

Would say Cavan/Leitem/Monaghan/Longford and that general area are the coldest and also snowiest.

South midland/mid-western areas warmest in summer.

Donegal windiest. east midlands/Dublin driest. Kerry, W Clare & W Mayo wettest. Mayo/Connemara/mid-west most thundery & Wicklow/Wexford/Waterford most sunniest. N Kerry up to Donegal the dullest.

Limerick junction in Tipperary is the coldest windiest place in Ireland

Kerry must be the wettest, whenever im in kerry its raining.

Valentia Island has the highest average year-round temperature of any weather observation station in Ireland: 10.9º, but Rosslare is the sunniest station - average year-round is 4.38 hrs of sunshine/day. The driest station is either Ringsend (lowest precipitation; 683 mm precipitation per year) or Dublin Airport (fewest wet days; 128/year).

Mullingar has the lowest average year-round temperature: 9.3º. Birr is the cloudiest; average 3.2 hrs sunshine/day. The wettest is either Leenane (2,875 mm precipitation per year) or Belmullet (183 wet days per year).

From which we can conclude: if you want warmth and sunshine, stick to the coast and stay south. To avoid rain, stay east.

Resurrecting this month old thread... I wanted to give a response at the time but the data I was compiling was nowhere near done. Fortunately, (the only good thing about new Boards for me) Boards saved my response as a draft so I can continue where I left off.

I have been working on an Irish temperature records by county database for a good while now and this is a tabulated form of the maximum temperature records using the data available at hand. Most of the old temperature records were compiled using old UK Met monthly weather reports rather than datasets due to limited access in data in certain cases - for example, no access to Kilkenny Castle or Foynes data. So as a result, may have missed a temperature record or two here and there. If a row has only a year, the date is unknown. It will have been mentioned or referenced in a past article but an exact date was not given and a date cannot be found due to limited access to data.

I know this doesn't really answer the question of hottest counties as say an average temperature would but hopefully it's of interest nevertheless as I have worked so hard on it with hours and hours of dedication. It's probably the most amount of time I've put into a weather project since my Irish heatwaves series. A tabular form of the minimum temperature one will be up sometime too. I plan to incorporate the Northern Ireland counties into the database but for now, sticking with the counties in the Republic.

Edit: I have no idea why the quality of the table image is poor, it's fine elsewhere outside Boards.

Have a good weekend anyway folks!

Brilliant work.

All I could add to this discussion is that month after month when I calculate the "IMT" for our contests, my habit is to look at the five stations in the order of Claremorris, Mullingar, Casement, Oak Park and Shannon and it's usually the case that the mean temperature rises steadily from the start to the end of that circuit, although Mullingar-Casement more likely to be even. Shannon is quite often a full degree warmer than Oak Park.

Tables are far too big, looks a mess when one attempts to save them as PDFs. An online page of an embedded table is the best solution as far as I can see.