The summer just passed was as cold and as miserable as people can remember, according to the seasonal summary.
Met Éireann says it was the coldest summer since 2015 with an average temperature of just 14.5 degrees almost 0.3 degrees below the long term average for 1991-2020.
It is the first time since the spring of 2021 that a season has been colder than average.
The blame for the cool summer was northerly airflows from the Arctic which set in in early June. It blocked warmer air from the south and this air flow continued for both June and July.
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The highest temperature of the season was just 26.6 degrees recorded at the Phoenix Park on Monday, June 24th, the lowest maximum summer temperature for Ireland since 2015.
June and July, though cool, were drier than average. August was a mixed month with parts of the north and west getting their wettest August in recorded history. In the case of Malin Head in Co Donegal these records stretch back 69 years.
Provisional rainfall data suggests suggests summer 2024 saw an average rainfall total of 237 mm, which was 86 per cent of the long-term average and 39 per cent drier than summer 2023.
Dublin Airport had its driest summer since 2018 with 104.7mm of rain (53 per cent of the seasonal average) while Newport in Co Mayo had four times that amount of rainfall at 419mm, 130 per cent of its long-term average.
In its report, Met Éireann said that summer 2024 was cool and relatively dry overall.
“Several arctic blasts from the north in early June set the scene for what turned out to be the first cooler than average season since spring 2021 (13 seasons ago). A zonal jet stream (west to east), directly over or close to Ireland for most of the season, blocked warm air masses to the south from pushing north over Ireland,” it said.
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Met Éireann climatologist Paul Moore cautioned against any interpretation of the figures which might suggest that climate change is not real.
The summer of 2024 is part of “natural variability” but the previous 12 seasons had been warmer than average. If global warming was not occurring, half of these seasons would have above average temperatures and half would be below, he explained.
He stressed that the average temperature for the summer of 2024 was still above the average summer temperature for the period of 1961 to 1990 by 0.25 degrees.
“It shows how our perceptions have changed for what a cooler and warmer summer is as the climate has warmed gradually over the last number of years,” he said.
