Climate Monitoring Indices for Ireland

A key goal in the developing area of Climate Services at Met Éireann is the delivery of relevant climate information that can assist policy decision making in Ireland.

One such area is the provision of indices associated with climate extremes. Here the ETCCDI indices have been used to assess trends in extreme temperature and rainfall events at locations around Ireland, based on daily observations.  The primary aim is to provide easily accessible information for end users to assess the potential vulnerabilities/opportunities posed to their sectors by Ireland’s changing climate; be it in the form of longer growing seasons, less frosts or greater heat stress.

Reductions in cold extremes are found to be generally more significant than increases in warm extremes, with the warming of minimum temperature extremes being slightly more robust than for maximum temperatures. Warming trends pervade all the temperature indices and the results are generally consistent across the stations analysed.  This is not the case for rainfall indices, with large year-to-year variability and differences between stations. The majority of stations indicate increasing trends in total precipitation, though only a minority of these are found to be statistically significant. There is a large degree of uncertainty in the indices associated with extreme heavy rainfall events.

Specific drought monitoring products have also been developed for users in the water sector, in the form of maps of the Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) and Standardized Precipitation-Evapotranspiration Index (SPEI) using gridded observational datasets. While the Irish climate is typically associated with abundant amounts of rainfall, two recent drought events (July 2018 and May 2020) caused significant disruption for both agriculture and general water infrastructure. This has focused attention on providing relevant up-to-date information to relevant stakeholders, and resulted in the production of a near real-time operational product of catchment average SPI.

An outline of the framework for producing and disseminating these indices will be presented, along with the main findings of dominant trends in climate extremes for Ireland.