Pleasantly sunny weather until Sunday at least

SUMMER HAS arrived with warm, sunny weather forecast for the rest of the week.

Temperatures are likely to reach 22 or 23 degrees in inland areas tomorrow and Friday and it will be dry and sunny everywhere.

Met Éireann forecaster Vincent O’Shea said it would not reach the “dizzy heights” of the weekend of May 22nd and 23rd when record May highs were recorded in Dublin, but it would be pleasant and sunny everywhere for the rest of the week and into the bank holiday weekend.

“We’ll certainly get between four and five days of decent weather, similar to what we had during the recent warm weather.

“Things will gradually improve through today and tomorrow. It looks like it will stay dry up to and including Sunday with some very warm sunny spells,” he said.

The weather is promising for the Westlife concert on Saturday night in Croke Park, the first big outdoor concert of the year, the Bloom garden festival in the Phoenix Park and for the Cork city marathon on Monday.

The high pressure will be replaced by more unsettled conditions next week, but it will still stay relatively dry. Met Éireann does not do forecast past five days while the Met Office in Britain has stopped doing such forecasts after being widely ridiculed for predicting a “barbecue summer” last year.

However, Nasa, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, is expecting near-record worldwide temperatures because of the impact of El Niño. The Irish Climatic Analysis Research Unit (Icarus) at NUI Maynooth says sea temperatures augur well for a period of settled weather this summer following on from three washouts in succession.

The weather has been getting warmer in recent weeks after the coldest start of the year for decades. Spring in Ireland was the coldest on average since 2001 in places and that followed on from the coldest winter since 1963.

March saw freezing temperatures at the start of the month with a grass temperature of -12.3 on March 8th at Casement aerodrome. Temperatures in April and May were on average slightly above normal, but both months had cold spells. Everywhere there were lower rainfall levels and more sunshine than normal. Valentia Observatory had its sunniest spring since records began.