Weather warning spells bad news for 70,000 fans at Electric Picnic

Met Éireann has issued a status yellow weather warning for wind and rain for the weekend with the prospect of widespread flooding.

The warning has been issued for 31 of the 32 counties for Saturday - Fermanagh being the one exception - and for the all counties of the Republic on Sunday.

While rain will be welcomed by farmers and gardeners given the extremely dry summer, it is bad news for those attending the Electric Picnic at Stradbally, Co Laois over the weekend.

The weather forecast shows heavy rain heading for the 70,000 campers attending the festival on Friday night with the downpours persisting until midday on Saturday.

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The rest of Saturday will be dry, but it will rain again overnight on Saturday night.

Sunday afternoon looks set to be pleasant and warm, but by then there will be a lot of mud around, explains Met Éireann forecaster Joanna Donnelly.

She says the prolonged dry spell has made the ground like concrete and it will not be able to absorb the rain.

It’s a process in meteorology called hydrophobic where it repels water.

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“What we needed was showery rain to soften up the ground a little bit, but it is not looking likely,” she explained.

“Initially what we are going to see is rivers of water running off the fields until it soaks in. There is going to be consistent rain right through the night. A lot of that is going to pool and puddle off and then it is going to make mud.

“On Saturday night it is going to be windy with very heavy rain and thunder in there. Saturday night is going to be a rough night for anybody in the tents.

“The ground could do with twice as much rain as it does now, but the way it is going to fall will not be favourable for the ground.”

Sunday will be “mostly OK”, she said, but Sunday night will see more rain coming through.

Elsewhere the rain will make a significant impact in the south and east. “There are farms that look nothing like Ireland, it’s so barren, but there is going to be a lot of flooding because the ground is so hydrophobic,” she added.

This weekend will mark the end of the prolonged dry spell with more unsettled and showery conditions coming next week. “The settled spell is over,” she said.

The rain will not be enough to address to the soil moisture deficit, she said however, as some parts of the south and east have deficits of 70mms (the amount of rain needed to restore the soil to normal moisture levels)”.

The weather statistics for August show that it was a warm and dry month everywhere.

Roches Point in Co Cork had its warmest and driest August since records began there. The highest temperature ever recorded in August in Ireland, a 31.7 degrees at Oak Park, Co Carlow, was recorded on Friday August 12th.