Summer 2019 - General Discussion

Very short record history (only back to 2011) but that Athenry rainfall total already makes it the wettest on record there. Current wettest is August 2018 with 126.1mm.

sryanbruen wrote: »

I think August has a good chance of verifying too provided the atmosphere remains stable and something unique or a disturbance does not occur, like a sudden change in ENSO or the North Atlantic SST profile intensifying to favour -NAO for example. This is the same with July to some extent too.


To summarise month by month:

June - A relatively cool and unsettled month but no significant deviations from average.

July - A warmer than average month with the potential for some very warm weather. Generally anticyclonic.

August - Much warmer than average but the ongoing risk of an unstable atmosphere resulting in variable rainfall.

As always, long range forecasting is unreliable and not to be taken seriously so this forecast is just for fun. Thanks for reading. We'll see how she goes.

June and July forecasts were on point in my opinion although I was not expecting the brief warm interval at the end of June. Despite places seeing a wet July, this was mainly down to individual days' downpours and in fact, much of the month was anticyclonic.

August looks like it's going to be a big flop. It has been warmer than average so far with a fair bit of rain to say the least but with the Atlantic domination continuing, cooler than average conditions are expected this week into the next (going by latest NWP).

As I mentioned in the forecast, I went for a warm August which I was quite bullish on but I didn't exactly go for the dry signal that analogues were pin pointing towards. I went against this because of my gut feeling at the time saying that something in the atmosphere would throw a spanner in the works. In this case, it was two spanners.

1. First is the North Atlantic SST profile which has favoured -NAO throughout the summer (and I theorised this might be the case in the forecast but didn't have much evidence to prove this).

2. Second is the change in ENSO from El Nino to La Nina. There is a rumour that goes around about a sudden change of ENSO impacting the summer season and such a change is usually negative for warm/dry weather in Ireland. I am not too sure on the science behind it though. Currently, the equatorial Pacific is in a neutral state but cool SSTs have developed over the past few months to the east and have expanded over time. Whilst this is not a La Nina signature (yet), the SSTs are looking to go towards the colder side of neutral which is quite a big change from the spring and early summer when the weak El Nino from 2018-19 just seemed to hang on.

So August looks like being a fail from my forecast but ah well, you win some, you lose some. That's the way the cookie crumbles.