2024 could be another record-breaking year for NI weather - Met Office (2024)

Northern Ireland is likely to have had its hottest June and wettest July since records began in 2023 - but the Met Office says we could see even more records broken in 2024 because of our changing climate.

It is well known by now that burning fossil fuels is heating up our planet, and while attribution studies haven't been done on whether recent floods and storms were caused by the climate crisis - human-induced changes to the Earth's atmosphere were found to have doubled the chances of the heatwave we saw in June.

We spoke to Met Office meteorologist, Annie Shuttleworth, about the year we've just had weather-wise and what's in store for 2024.

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She said: "Our winters will become warmer and wetter and the summers, drier and warmer."

As for storms, she added: "We had a really quiet season last year. We only had one storm and it wasn't named until August - it was the longest wait for a storm since we started naming them.

"But then since September we've had six. Of those, the ones that affected Northern Ireland were Agnes, Debi, Fergus and Ellen. Debi, Fergus and Ellen were all named by Met Éireann because Ireland saw the strongest winds and much of the rest of the UK didn't see as many impacts from them.

"I know Agnes did bring quite a lot of disruption to ferry services in September. We have had a good start to the storm season this year and that has meant we had a pretty wet autumn. Northern Ireland saw 50% more average rainfall across all of autumn."

According to Annie, while there have been no studies done that could link the storms and wet weather we've experienced with the climate crisis, one done in July by the Met Office found our warmest June on record since the previous joint record of 1940 and 1976 had "at least doubled since the 1940s" because of climate change.

"June was the warmest on record [for] Northern Ireland," she added.

"It showed that since 1940, the chance of beating that record has doubled and that was sort of driven by human induced climate change.

"You then had the wettest July, which was a similar picture to the whole of the UK. It was a really mixed summer in that we had a really warm June, a wet July, August wasn't brilliant either and then September we had another burst of heat as well.

"The summer was broken up by an unsettled few months."

"I think the fact you have seen the wettest July, the warmest June - we are seeing more and more records in the UK being broken more and more frequently and that is in line with the warming change in our climate due to climate change.

"The frequency that we are breaking records now does show that our climate is changing and you can't really compare it to how it used to be."

This year's summer weather was also blamed in part for the blue-green algae outbreak on Lough Neagh by DAERA.

What's in store for 2024

Annie says in the future "we are expecting to continue to see similar trends of records continuing to be broken".

"We are in line with how we would expect our climate to be behaving with increasing climate change," she continued.

"In general the average temperatures each year are increasing."

In January, Annie says NI weather "could stay fairly unsettled" and "it's looking like it could be some colder weather rising and more settled weather for the second half of winter".

"It's looking like it could be closer to average if not a bit colder than average after the new year but that doesn't rule out stormy spells or warmer spells because our weather does change quite a lot day to day."

As for snow, she added: "As is often the case through January or February, there will probably be some snow showers at some point but we are not expecting anything unusual at this stage."

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