The strategic lead in the European Centre with the Copernicus Climate Change Service, Samantha Burgess has said that climate change was responsible for the wettest February in years.<\/p>\n
\u201cA more southerly jet stream and then a number of atmospheric rivers coming across the Atlantic really drove those storm tracks leading to that record amount of rainfall in many locations,\u201d she told RT\u00c9 radio\u2019s Morning Ireland.<\/p>\n
Parts of the southeast of Ireland, France and the Iberian peninsula were also heavily hit, Burgess added.<\/p>\n
There were a number of factors which led to the heavy rainfall, including the fact that a warmer atmosphere holds more moisture, so it rains more intensely, and because the polar jet has moved further south.<\/p>\n
It was not unusual to have storms in February, but there had been seven or eight in a row.<\/p>\n
That frequency of storms, with record amounts of precipitation, meant that the ground was \u201csuper saturated\u201d and so could not absorb the rainfall, she explained.<\/p>\n
Temperatures had fluctuated throughout February, she said.<\/p>\n
It had been one of the coldest Februarys in the past 14 years for Europe, with much colder averages in Scandinavia, up to three to five degrees colder than average.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The strategic lead in the European Centre with the Copernicus Climate Change Service, Samantha Burgess has said that…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":342105,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[246,61,60,82],"class_list":["post-342104","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-environment","tag-environment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/342104","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=342104"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/342104\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/342105"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=342104"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=342104"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=342104"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}