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A NEW FLOOD FORECAST centre is set to launch at Met Éireann early next year, the agency’s Head of Forecasting has said in an interview with The Journal.
In the wake of a year of several significant floods around the country due to storms, it’s hoped that the new centre will be able to provide clear information.
In particular, flood forecasters at the centre will be working with local authorities to warn them if it appears likely they will need to take defensive measures, like deploying sandbags or closing roads.
Speaking to The Journal, Met Éireann’s Head of Forecasting Eoin Sherlock said that the centre has been in development for a number of years and should be fully operational by around the end of January or start of February.
“That will mean we’ll have a flood forecast centre providing flood information and guidance to key stakeholders, particularly local authorities and our colleagues in the national directorate for emergency management,” Sherlock said.
Met Éireann has been examining river and coastal models, developing infrastructure, and recruiting staff for the new centre.
“Similar enough to what we have in the weather office, there’ll be hydrometeorologists, or ‘flood forecasters’, issuing guidance and advisories.”
Many parts of the country were hit by severely damaging floods this year, including Cork and Waterford during Storm Babet.
Floods are expected to become more regular and more threatening as climate change worsens.
Overall, Met Éireann expects it will need to issue more Status Orange and Status Red weather warnings as the frequency and intensity extreme weather events increase due to climate change – though adjustments are also being made to the thresholds for weather warnings in line with the changing patterns.
“It’s likely that we’re going to see more of the Oranges, and, heaven forbid, the Reds, because we’re seeing the impacts of extreme weather,” Sherlock explained.
He outlined that weather warnings are tied to a threshold, such as an amount of rain in a particular period of time or how strong a wind will be.
“We have to look at it in terms of the climate. We analysed the climate over the last number of years and so to accurately reflect the changing climate, we’re modifying the thresholds.
One of the changes is an increase to the Yellow wind warning threshold from 50 to 55 kilometres per hour. Another is an increase to the threshold for a Yellow low temperature warning as the number of frost nights declines.
“We’ll be slightly modifying the threshold for a number of meteorological parameters to reflect that the climate has changed.”
Globally, climate records are being broken year on year.
If global average temperatures rise by 1.5 degrees, the world “faces unavoidable multiple climate hazards” in the next 20 years, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Exceeding a 1.5 degree rise, even temporarily, would lead to “additional severe impacts, some of which will be irreversible”.
Sherlock said that meteorologists in Ireland have observed more and more extreme weather events this year.
“We had periods of drought. We had the hottest June on record and the wettest July on record. We had a marine heatwave as well, which really hasn’t been something we’ve seen in Ireland,” he said.
“This is the first time we’ve had so many storms so early in the in the year. For the first time, we’ve had two named storms on a Saturday and a Sunday – Storm Elin and Storm Fergus. We had Storm Babet with the flooding in Middleton. We had the tornado in Leitrim.
“There’s clear science that our climate is changing. We’re seeing extreme weather events more regularly. This is the way the world is headed, unfortunately, due to the changing climate.
Sherlock said that more days of sunshine will mean people will need to be cautious about how much time they spend in the sun and protect themselves from risks like developing skin cancer.
Additionally, “another thing we have to be careful about is heat impacts on particularly vulnerable people and the elderly”.
“At night, if temperatures don’t go below 18 or 19 degrees, your body doesn’t have an opportunity to cool down and that can be very difficult for elderly people and people who have underlying conditions,” he said.
“You wouldn’t have thought in Ireland that we’d have that, but we’re seeing warmer and warmer temperatures — and we’re seeing more heatwaves.”
Speaking to reporters, Minister for Climate Eamon Ryan said Ireland must “focus on adaptation and protecting ourselves against climate impact, not just trying to reduce emissions”.
“I do think there has been a game-changer in terms of understanding this — that it isn’t just about culverting rivers and concrete embankments and so on, it’s about how you treat the river upstream and how you manage the source of the water and how you hold it back through grassland management, forestry management, peatland restoration, using natural floodplain areas,” he said.
He added: “I think the Office of Public Works are starting to understand that.”
“The work we’re doing on the Land Use Review will help because that has to optimise for so many different things but included in that is managing our water system. It’s not impossible, and it’s often I think as well nature-based solutions as well as the physical works that the OPW will do.”
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I remember waking up to 3ft of water in my living room in Mallow during the 60’s. Cork towns have been battling flooding for as long as anyone can remember, blaming destroyed businesses and homes on climate change is a very ease excuse from the government, the reason Middleton got f**cked was because some genius decide to build a greenway instead of building flood defences. It’s inevitable that Cork City will get destroyed one day due to the lack of proper flood defences, which the building off are being held up by the campaign “Love the lee”. This campaign preventing flood defence in cork is back by the Green Party
@Tom Barry: Is that the greenway that Cork County Council put down recently on the old Youghal to Midleton railway line that you are referring to?
@Douglaslad: I’m referring to interviews of local homeowners and business owners who in the aftermath of the flooding criticised the fact that public funds where allocated to building a greenway prior to the building of sufficient flood defences.
@Tom Barry: this year has been one of the worst I can remember for what I would call erratic weather , in a negative sense. Feels like we haven’t had a dry week since the middle of June. What rain fell here in kilkenny st Stephens night was nuts , saw floods in fields Wednesday morning that ive never seen wayer in before. Ive seen more reports of tornados this year than ive seen in the last 30 years. Theres just no break from the bad weather this last 6 months.
@Tom Barry: There are 3 rivers (2 overground and 1 underground) converging in Midleton. All 3 burst their banks at almost the same time. That’s why Midleton flooded so quickly with almost no warning. As regards Cork, look where the city is. Stand on Patrick’s Hill and look over towards St Fin Barre’s. That small gap has to take the entire catchment of the Lee. That’s why Cork floods.
@Tom Barry: the thinking now is that flood defences are massively expensive but also counter productive. Many of them only serve to push the flooding downstream to a different part of the river where the communities there flood and they start looking for flood defences. What does help is not having corrupt planning officials who will rezone a flood plain for housing, not draining existing swamps to turn them into farmland, revitalising bogs, not cutting down tree cover, not allowing over grazing, not allowing folks to pave over their driveway etc.
@Tom Barry: a river near me burst It’s Banks in 1998 after 80mm of rain in less than 24hrs.this year winter it started to over flow after 60mm of rain. I think the 2000 acres of land built on up river is causing the river to flood with less rainfall. Only a hydrologist would be qualified to confirm my theory.
Jobs for the boys. Hey lads it’s pouring out….ring RTE and panic everybody.
@Gerry Hannan: I think it would be better if we do nothing. It’s been working fine for us so far.
The rise of the quango’s again! It’s nearly one a month now at this rate.
Stop building on flood plains and cutting down trees. I have seen so many areas locally that are prone to holding water. Yet the landowners have cut down trees and removed hedging.
@Pat Corr: They couldn’t do it if they hadn’t been granted planning permission. Our government should underwrite and rehouse everyone trapped by flooding – that would stop these exploitative practices.
@F Fitzgerald: I have to say I agree but just as with the mica and pyrite and the defective apartments the Government underwriting means the taxpayer is again on the hook for the failure to properly control and regulate planning.
@Harry Whelks: We are the people who voted them into power year in year out, knowing what was going on and still reelected them. When the public voted last time the sworn civil war enemies coalesced together and with the greens to keep sf out and we still live with their policies. So the taxpayer should rightly be on the hook for endorsing our governments actions. Its a po-xy situation we’ve gotten ourselves into, so maybe we will like our government constantly says when found out that the lessons have been learned and changes will be made
That’s a meteorologists wet dream
They’d want to hire some proper forecasters first, and invest heavily in some proper equipment… We need something a bit more professional than Theresa Minion…..
@Steve Davis: Exactly. Are they installing water level stations etc around the country or is it just a group of wannabees sitting in a room winging it?
@David Corrigan: there are water level stations already installed around the country, have been for years!! You can use waterlevel.ie to check them yourself. It’s hilarious when ignorant people get annoyed solely because of their ignorance.
@NotMyIreland: Thanks for that. Why didn’t they use that data to warn the people of Cork recently then? Somebody must have been monitoring things, right?
@NotMyIreland: I guess the Disclaimer answers that.
Disclaimer
Data is provisional, unchecked, and has not been validated to remove invalid or improbable values.
Data may be inaccurate due to instrument errors, malfunctions or physical changes at the measurement site.
Data may be delayed due to telemetry issues or system malfunctions.
Data is provided on a best efforts basis – the OPW will endeavour to maintain data availability, but does not guarantee continuity of services. Recording of data at some stations may cease. Data for such stations will be preserved as part of the OPW Hydrometric archive.
It is the responsibility of the user to ensure that the data, if used, are accurate and fit for purpose.
The Commissioners of Public Works will not be responsible for any loss or damage howsoever arising from the use or interpretation of the data, and reserve the right to reprocess the data as they deem necessary.
@David Corrigan: I’m all seriousness I’d say the data available at waterlevel.ie and from these stations will be used in conjunction with previous weather station results to inform the modelling system they propose to use. Monitoring the water levels alone wouldn’t give enough time for some of the more recent types of floods. Understanding how much rain, has exactly what effect on the river, when it falls in place x or place y will lead to more precise warnings. Seems the system has been in development a few years at this stage.
@NotMyIreland: It could be automated with the cheap and power IoT platforms that are now available. I work in that area and it can easily be put together.
It’s a shame the data was always there and still people lost their businesses etc over nobody using the data. Probably millions spent on the monitors and no return so far.
@Steve Davis: I presume you’re referring to Teresa Mannion – she’s a reporter and works for RTE, nothing to do with Met Eireann and weather forecasting. As an aside, why do you consider her to be unprofessional?
There isn’t one meteorologist in Ireland who comprehends what is behind long-term weather (the seasons). For a short while, they managed to convince society that long-term weather is climate so they could force through computer-generated dire conclusions, which were picked up by a subculture in a belief that humanity can control the weather. Climate then became an issue of human behaviour and a political vehicle, and the relationship between the motions of the Earth as the primary driver of climate remains ignored.
LOL
@Tom Barry: more uninformed comments from you, but that’s to be expected I guess.
To say that the Middleton flooding was due to the greenway in any shape or form is absolutely wrong. It is possibly more to do with the huge concrete area the distillery placed in an important natural drainage area.
That aside, flood defences are massively complicated and not always an easy answer. The amount of rain is the amount of rain and, when it falls it has to go somewhere – that’s basic physics. If you place defences in one place, it simply pushes the problem to somewhere else and, as other have said, if building on the floodplains has been going on for decades then you quickly find you have a problem that is impossible to fix.
Hedgerows, wooded areas etc used to slow the pace of rainfall reaching the river system, that has been drastically reduced over decades so we now see that water reaching the rivers far quicker which in turn causes more flash flooding.
Also, you don’t have to go digging too deep to see how many other countries around the world are facing unusually common adverse weather events – like it or not it’s a global problem that isn’t going to be remedied by diverting funds away from a greenway.
@Wombleman: he didn’t say that building a greenway caused the flooding, he said they spent money on a greenway and not on flood defences.
@Wombleman: You’re misreading his comment. He said he was one of many who wanted to see flood defence schemes funded before any other developments in the area.
I didn’t read it that they are opposed to any greenway, more that they’d like it to be a long-term project.
Sure we have the opposite example of residents in other areas objecting to seawalls to keep flooding at bay because they want a view!
Probably will be under water before it opens
A team of half a dozen people can predict world weather using software and accurately. International/national/local that same data is made available to application software and for your phone/desktop. Why on earth do we need Met Éireann at all, technology surpassed it long ago.
@Osprey: Give the typical Journal poster a synoptic weather chart and they would be lost.
About time to take it out of the hands of the ESB Somehow I can’t see that happening
@Kevin Hannan: Since when did the ESB do the weather forecast?
@Steve Davis: hilarious given your Teresa Mannion comment above
A lack of proper planning allowing flood plains to be built on, no foresight on the consequences of these decisions and no lessons learned as usual. Millions spent designing flood defences but rarely implemented in many cases. We are seeing our chickens come home to roost and in most cases there is nothing that can be done as man is unable to substantially alter the impacts of weather phenomena. The idea we can control the climate or weather is firmly in the realms of science fiction
In fairness, the Netherlands have successfully managed to alleviate flooding. Also, New York was built on several rivers. Their subway, for example, is kept dry by constantly running electric pumps.
It’s a quirk of marine transport history that most of the world’s cities were founded on coastal ports. Unless we go the route of Indonesia and relocate our main cities outright, we’ll have to invest in diverting the water to flow around them safely. Agree with you that once sea water swamps the drains and aquifers, it’ll be too late to relocate and there won’t be the infrastructure in place to house anyone.
@Spanner: Here’s what is happening in Jakarta, with 10 million people.
Well if it helps go for it.
What I am missing is an all-round approach, what about areas that are hilly but grazing lands? Thinking potentially landslides, does anyone know of plans how to address ?
have your say