“Significant” snow and ice is expected over the weekend and into next week as a weather front from Siberia descends on Ireland.
The severe weather will settle in on Saturday and will last until Wednesday at the earliest.
The wind will come from the east and north-east and will pick up moisture in the Irish Sea which is forecast to fall as snow.
The eastern coast from Antrim to Waterford is likely to see significant accumulations of snow. Daytime temperatures of no more than four degrees will see much of it lying on the ground.
Early indications suggest that next Wednesday may bring even further accumulations of snow as an Atlantic depression meets cold easterly air from Siberia.
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
Advertisement— Met Éireann (@MetEireann) February 3, 2021
The weather phenomenon which will be bringing snow and ice is a sudden stratospheric warming event which occurred in the Arctic recently. The same phenomenon brought the “Beast from the East” in February 2018 which saw the heaviest snowfalls in Ireland since 1982.
Met Éireann forecaster Gerry Murphy told The Irish Times: “Those events do and often cause the weather patterns to adjust where we have a cold airflow coming in over Ireland. It does look like that’s the situation.”
“We will have very cold weather for Sunday, Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. The winds will feed in showers over the eastern half of the country and those showers will be of sleet and snow,” he said.
“As the cold weather persists, each day and each night will be colder. The showers will become wintery. A fair few of those are likely to be of snow from Sunday into Wednesday.”
There will be frost and ice in the west of the country, but the showers will be mostly coming off the Irish Sea and snow is unlikely.
Mr Murphy cautioned that it was too uncertain to say if conditions will be as bad as they were three years ago.
