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The previous wettest March on the books was in 2019. Alamy Stock Photo

Met Éireann: Last month provisionally the wettest March on record

Provisional data show 173.3mm of rain fell from Irish skies last month, up from 33.9m in February.

WHILE APRIL GOT off to a showery start, last month was the wettest March on record, according to Met Éireann.

The previous wettest March on the books – which has recorded rainfall going back 83 years – was in 2019.

Provisional figures show 173.3mm of rain fell from Irish skies last month, up from 33.9m in February, which Met Éireann says was the fourth driest February on record.

According to the forecaster’s climate statement for winter 2022/23, the lowest monthly rainfall total in February was in Johnstown Castle in Wexford, where 7.4mm of rain was recorded, the lowest figure since 1986.

More information on last month’s weather patterns will be provided in the March climate statement, due to be published tomorrow.

The UK experienced similarly wet weather. 

England and Wales had their respective wettest Marches in 40 years, while Northern Ireland had its third wettest March on record.

According to provisional figures from the UK Met Office, Wales had 206.5mm of rain last month, double its long-term average.

In the same time 119.2mm of rain fell in England, 104% more rainfall than average and Northern Ireland saw 151.2mm of rainfall, 74% more than average.

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21 Comments
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    Mute Gareth McMahon
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    Apr 3rd 2023, 6:40 PM

    Cue drought fear mongering come August.

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    Mute Alan Biddulph
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    Apr 3rd 2023, 6:54 PM

    @Gareth McMahon: Double whinge?

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    Mute John Kieran G.
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    Apr 3rd 2023, 7:00 PM

    @Gareth McMahon: Something in this article that you don’t agree with?

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    Mute Joseph Mc Dermott
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    Apr 3rd 2023, 8:43 PM

    @Gareth McMahon: your whinging about the whingers go figure

    19
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    Mute Sean Walsh
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    Apr 3rd 2023, 7:29 PM

    And yet, if we get 2/3 weeks of warm dry weather in the summer, the local councils will start talking about hosepipe bans etc. Why can’t we store all this water that falls from the sky ?

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    Mute Larry Betts
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    Apr 3rd 2023, 7:33 PM

    @Sean Walsh: Exactly. Everyone should build their own little watershed in the back garden.

    36
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    Mute Fergal Doyle
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    Apr 3rd 2023, 9:41 PM

    @Sean Walsh: What’s this we business Sean

    13
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    Mute Gareth McMahon
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    Apr 3rd 2023, 6:43 PM

    Thankfully we been building reservoirs to cater for our ‘new to the parish’.

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    Mute Carrickview
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    Apr 3rd 2023, 6:45 PM

    It is a weather statement.

    A climate statement is that Ireland has a maritime climate and that doesn’t change.

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    Mute Diarmuid Hunt
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    Apr 3rd 2023, 7:12 PM

    @Carrickview: Obviously unless we move away from the sea but those kinds of simplistic statements mean very little. If our weather keeps breaking records in different directions over the long term then that would be climate (dare I say ‘change’)

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    Mute Carrickview
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    Apr 3rd 2023, 7:20 PM

    @Diarmuid Hunt:

    Nothing simplistic about a fact.

    The scientific method is behind climate change modelling and specifically-

    “Rule III. The qualities of bodies which are found to belong to all bodies within the reach of our experiments, are to be esteemed the universal qualities of all bodies whatsoever.” Newton

    Want to equate the fall of an apple (experiment) with the orbital motion of the planets (Universal qualities) or the conditions in a garden greenhouse (experiment) with the Earth’s atmosphere (Universal qualities) then that was the overreaching nature of empirical modelling.

    I would hope that younger people inspect how experimental theorists go about their business and exactly how that subculture influences our era in all sorts of disruptive ways. Far from being simple, it is a very tangled area of research with nobody presently with the familiarity to deal with how Sir Isaac tried to make astronomical predictions ( eclipses, transits, moon phases and so on) look like experimental predictions.

    I can do it but not without visual demonstrations ( sadly cannot do that with the Journal) and not to throw good information after bad but to return Earth sciences like climate and biology back to stable and enjoyable pursuits.

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    Mute Diarmuid Hunt
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    Apr 3rd 2023, 8:58 PM

    @Carrickview: Why do you keep going back to Newton? We’ve moved on from his theories by building on them. It was simplistic saying that weather is not climate without realising that weather over a prolonged period of time is climate which is exactly what I said. Use modern science which has moved on from Newton, Einstein and Darwin if you want to be taken half seriously.

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    Mute Carrickview
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    Apr 3rd 2023, 9:27 PM

    @Diarmuid Hunt: ” Why do you keep going back to Newton?”

    All empirical modelling, including climate change modelling, can be traced back to Newton’s attempt to connect experimental predictions with astronomical predictions. You saw the Rule III statement which constitutes the scientific method without comprehending what it represents even though some people will get a rough idea of what they have been subjected to and swindled with.

    The academics are so lazy and petty these days that they don’t bother with their cheerleaders anymore, after all the weather in February was dry while the weather in March was wet. Ireland still had a maritime climate during those two months, two years, two thousand years and so on hence there was no climate statement.

    I can’t present the graphics and imaging needed to demonstrate how solar system and Earth science research was vandalised by Newton to make way for experimental theorists. It leads to a type of autism where readers no longer have a connection with basic planetary facts much less new approaches to climate.

    When you can be inspired by the dynamics which make life on Earth possible, you will opt for dire and dour conclusions as a substitute. Such is climate change modelling.

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    Mute Carrickview
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    Apr 3rd 2023, 9:29 PM

    When you cannot be inspired by the dynamics which make life on Earth possible, you will opt for dire and dour conclusions as a substitute. Such is climate change modelling and those who live off anxiety and dull perspectives.

    12
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    Mute Diarmuid Hunt
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    Apr 3rd 2023, 10:08 PM

    @Carrickview: A type of Autism? You don’t know what Autism is. Just because empiricism has so far been shown to be true doesn’t make all that Newton said to be true. Academics aren’t lazy, their goal is to prove themselves or their peers wrong. You couldn’t prove yourself if you had graphics or videos or anything else, if you could you’d be showing it to people who have studied these topics and not be posting sh!te on the journal. You’d get a Nobel prize for proving a whole field of science wrong but no, you are here spouting nonsense. If you are right then pit your hypothesis together and put it up for peer review or at least publish it to a website where the layperson can see it, I’ll be waiting on your link.

    15
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    Mute Carrickview
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    Apr 3rd 2023, 10:44 PM

    @Diarmuid Hunt:

    This isn’t about prizes, this is about young people having a fighting chance to escape the indulgences of experimental theorists and where they draw their convictions from.

    An astronomical hypothesis was originally based on the Ptolemaic framework as that framework allowed geocentric astronomers to predict astronomical events to dates within the calendar system. Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo had to present a moving Earth in a Sun-centred system as a hypothesis, however, contemporary satellite imaging can now provide a demonstration of the Earth’s motion and those of the other planets without the need for a hypothesis.

    An experimental hypothesis via the scientific method was that experiments at a human level scale up to solar system and Earth science research. In this case, the conditions in a garden greenhouse scale up to the Earth’s atmosphere so these theorists can cobble together whatever is necessary to reach their speculative conclusions and then pass them off as facts.

    If people imagine the Good Friday Agreement was a thorny issue and full of intransigent people, they know nothing of the experimental subculture and what it takes to undo the damage of that community.

    I don’t talk down to people, I give them the courtesy of getting a rough idea of what is involved and why it is highly disruptive and dangerous for a productive and creative society. In short, young people shouldn’t wait and should trust themselves and their own perceptive abilities.

    I expect to be banned soon enough.

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    Mute David Jordan
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    Apr 3rd 2023, 10:56 PM

    @Carrickview: The greenhouse effect was discovered 200 years ago this year and we discovered CO2 is a greenhouse 163 years ago. And one of the first warnings of climate change, linked to burning fossil fuels, was published in a newspaper 110 years ago.

    That’s some long term commitment to this conspiracy.

    Joseph Fourier first described the greenhouse effect in his 1822 book Théorie analytique de la chaleur (The Analytical Theory of Heat). He wrote:

    “As a dam built across a river causes a local deepening of the stream, so our atmosphere, thrown as a barrier across the terrestrial rays, produces a local heightening of the temperature at the Earth’s surface.”

    Then in 1859, John Tyndall (born Leighlinbridge, Co. Carlow) detected instrumentally that CO2 blocks infrared heat and in 1896 the Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius experimentally confirmed that CO2 is a Greenhouse Gas and warms the Earth using experiments involving a box with a window made of salt (which is transparent to heat):

    Arrhenius, S., 1896. XXXI. On the influence of carbonic acid in the air upon the temperature of the ground. The London, Edinburgh, and Dublin Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science, 41(251), pp.237-276.

    And warnings that burning fossil fuels causes global warming and climate change were first published in newspaper articles as early as 1912:

    “The furnaces of the world are now burning about 2,000,000,000 tons of coal a year. When this is burned, uniting with oxygen, it adds about 7,000,000,000 tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere yearly. This tends to make the air a more effective blanket for the earth and to raise its temperature. The effect may be considerable in a few centuries.”

    They were only wrong about the timeline, it’s happening now.

    See: “This week in 1912, a newspaper printed a spot-on warning about our warming world. We’re living in the future it predicted” – https://www.businessinsider.com/newspaper-in-1912-linked-coal-to-climate-change-2018-8

    The very sudden c. 1.25 Celsius warming in the last c. 120 years is due to 500 billion tons of CO2 we added to the atmosphere as well as burning down vast tracts of forests, as shown by this chart that shows a near perfect match between rising CO2 levels and global temperatures:

    http://berkeleyearth.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/annual-with-forcing-small.png

    The only deviation, 1 to 3 year dips in temperature, caused by volcanic eruptions that temporarily cool the Earth. Rising CO2 is the cause.

    Indeed, the Sun hasn’t got any brighter, volcanic eruption cool the plant rather than warm it, ocean circulation only slows this warming, sometimes. The only thing that warms the planet is the extra CO2 and other greenhouse gasses we added to the atmosphere.

    It’s real, it’s happening, it’s our fault and have to fix it before it gets too costly to fix.

    20
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    Mute Carrickview
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    Apr 4th 2023, 7:10 AM

    @David Jordan:

    The scientific or experimental method is based on the clockwork solar system where the relationship between one rotation of the planet and one 24-hour sunrise/noon/sunset cycle is denied.

    ” It is a fact not generally known that, owing to the difference between solar and sidereal time, the Earth rotates upon its axis once more often than there are [24-hour] days in the year” NASA

    The Earth turns once every 24 hours and a thousand times in a thousand 24-hour days as an anchor for everything that follows including weather where temperatures rise and fall in response to that rotation.

    Theoretical indulgence as the problem replaces the anxiety of climate change modelling and that is where young people have influence in changing things rather than acting as cannon fodder for the modelling community.

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    Mute BLD Games
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    Apr 4th 2023, 12:04 AM

    Is there anyone up for a bit of aul communism to solve the problem , I love a bit of communism I do.

    19
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    Mute Paul Whitehead
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    Apr 4th 2023, 5:49 PM

    The garden is a quagmire.

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    Mute Garreth Byrne
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    Apr 4th 2023, 12:00 PM

    March many weathers it certainly was not. Here is a forecast for April, subject to metrological corrections:

    April is the cruellest month, breeding
    Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
    Memory and desire, stirring
    Dull roots with spring rain.
    Winter kept us warm, covering
    Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
    A little life with dried tubers.

    1
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