{"id":161759,"date":"2025-11-27T03:02:08","date_gmt":"2025-11-27T03:02:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/161759\/"},"modified":"2025-11-27T03:02:08","modified_gmt":"2025-11-27T03:02:08","slug":"irelands-luck-will-run-out-in-avoiding-extreme-flooding-due-to-climate-change-scientists-say","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/161759\/","title":{"rendered":"Ireland’s ‘luck will run out’ in avoiding extreme flooding due to climate change, scientists say"},"content":{"rendered":"

Human-induced climate change heightened the risk of flooding during Storm Claudia<\/a> earlier this month and \u201cour luck will run out eventually\u201d when it comes to avoiding an “extreme event”, scientists have said.<\/p>\n

A group of researchers from Maynooth University and climate scientists from Met \u00c9ireann studied data from the orange-warning storm that hit Ireland only a few weeks ago, and found the rainfall associated with Claudia was 12% higher than the pre-industrial climate.<\/p>\n

Moreover, we can expect similar events in future to carry even greater flooding risks as global warming continues.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is important to stress how lucky Ireland has been in recent years when it comes to the occurrence of extreme weather events such as storms and heavy precipitation events, and that they haven’t occurred at the same time as a spring high tide,\u201d Lionel Swan, Maynooth PhD student at the WASITUS project at the Icarus Climate Research Centre, said.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Midleton flooding of 2023, Storm \u00c9owyn in January, and Storm Amy in October of this year all coincided with either a neap tide, or with a spring low tide.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n The worry is that our luck will run out eventually. We will experience an extreme event that coincides with a spring high tide, and the resulting impacts for flooding are likely to be far worse than we\u2019ve experienced before.\n <\/p>\n

The researchers said the heavy rain recorded during Storm Claudia followed several unusually wet months in Ireland. In September, 144% of the average rainfall was recorded, with October seeing 123% of its average rainfall.<\/p>\n

There were localised extremes in November, with Johnstown Castle in Wexford recording 58% of its average rainfall for that month in a single 24-hour period.<\/p>\n

\"'With‘With further global warming we can expect the magnitude of rainfall to increase, with more rain falling during events like this.’ Picture: Andy Gibson<\/p>\n

All this left soils saturated, river levels elevated and catchments \u201chighly responsive to additional rainfall\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhile the potential threats from the two-day rainfall event in the south-east were well communicated to the public, flood defences were seriously tested,\u201d Maynooth\u2019s Dr Claire Bergin, from the WASITUS project, said.<\/p>\n

\u201cWith further global warming we can expect the magnitude of rainfall to increase, with more rain falling during events like this.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

By looking at both the two-day rainfall event for Storm Claudia which affected Dublin, Wexford and Wicklow in particular, and the 30-day rainfall across nine counties with rivers that feed into south-eastern areas, the scientists said they pinpointed how intense short-term rainfall and prolonged wet conditions heightened the flooding risk in these areas.<\/p>\n

It said both the two-day and 30-day scenarios have become \u201ctwice as likely\u201d as would have been the case in a pre-industrial climate.<\/p>\n

It said that, with 3C of global warming which scientists say must be avoided at all costs, similar two-day rainfall events like this would happen every one to two years, while the prolonged 30-day rainfall events would happen once every two years.<\/p>\n

Met \u00c9ireann climatologist Paul Moore added: \u201cThis is one of the consequences of living in a warmer world.\u201d <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Human-induced climate change heightened the risk of flooding during Storm Claudia earlier this month and \u201cour luck will…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":161760,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[2885,42959,61,60,43,767],"class_list":["post-161759","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ireland","tag-climate-change","tag-flooding","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-news","tag-weather"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161759","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=161759"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161759\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/161760"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=161759"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=161759"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=161759"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}