While much of Europe is sweltering in early summer sun, with weather warnings in place across the southern part of the continent, Ireland is likely to be spared anything by way of a heatwave in the days ahead, forecasters have said.
“Thursday will be a pleasant enough day for much of the country,” said Met Éireann’s Joanna Donnelly. “But as is often the way, while the heat will make it across the English Channel in the days ahead it will only very briefly make it over the Irish Sea.”
She said that there would be “a bit of heat” in the south and east of Ireland right up to the weekend, but had less good news for the days after that. “The battle between the warm front from the south and a cold front coming down over the country from the north will rage on and the cold will ultimately prevail,” she told The Irish Times.
It is a very different story elsewhere. The second heatwave of the summer is currently wafting over Spain and pushing into France and up as far as Britain.
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All told nine of Spain’s 17 regions are on orange alert, the second highest level possible with temperatures set to top 40 degrees Celsius in the south and close to that in Madrid. “This is a very unusual situation. These temperatures are not normal in mid-June,” a spokesman for the Spanish Met Office said.
In France temperatures have already topped 35 degrees Celsius towards the Mediterranean and are likely to come close to 40 degrees. In Alsace, Brittany and the greater Paris region temperatures were expected to reach – and in some areas significantly exceed – 30 degrees.
The outlook for this part of the world is very different. It will be warm with sunny spells in the south and east, cloudier in the north and west, with showery outbreaks of rain at times on Thursday. It is likely to become fresher later Friday as a cold front spreads across the country from the northwest, with somewhat more unsettled conditions expected for the weekend.
The highest temperatures are likely to be on Friday in Munster and southeast Leinster, and are expected to climb to between 20 and 25 degrees with highs of 15 to 20 degrees elsewhere, coolest near northwest coasts.
