We’re in for a cold one, lads.
Siberian weather is set to bring snow and ice to Ireland this weekend as the international weather front arrives to chill the country.
The weather, which will come in the form of a freezing wind, will come from the east and north-east on Saturday and will remain until at least Wednesday next week.
The front is expected to be so cold that it very likely that many parts of the country will be experiencing snow as the weekend comes to a close, with the eastern coast of the country being the worst affected.
Met Éireann confirmed the arrival of the Siberian weather event this week, sharing a chart depicting a likely severe drop in temperature.
“On the left below is a probabilistic representation of max & min temperatures for Dublin from the ECMWF’s ENSEMBLE forecast system,” they said. “It shows a high amount of certainty that we’re in for some very cold days from Sunday onwards. But how long it will last?”
On the left below is a probabilistic representation of max & min temperatures for Dublin from the ECMWF's ENSEMBLE forecast system. It shows a high amount of certainty that we're in for some very cold days from Sunday onwards. But how long it will last? 🥶 ☃️ pic.twitter.com/822cXerlxK
— Met Éireann (@MetEireann) February 3, 2021
You tell us, lads. That’s generally the idea.
Reports of this weather event first generated a few weeks back as forecasters warned of a Sudden Stratospheric Warming Event, which would shift temperatures dramatically.
A similar event called the intense Beast from the East in February 2018, which saw the heaviest snowfalls in Ireland since the early ’80s.
An SSW event refers to what Met Éireann describes as “the reversal of zonal winds in the Stratosphere from westerly to easterly, along with a rapid jump in temperatures in the winter polar stratosphere that leads to a complete breakdown of the stratospheric polar vortex (SPV)”.
While the word ‘warming’ is included in the name for such an event, following a SSW, there can be “equatorward shift of the tropospheric jetstream with associated cold conditions over northern Europe and these impacts can be long lasting,” as was the case with the Beast from the East and Storm Emma in 2018.
