Scientists at ICHEC have used supercomputing to predict Ireland’s weather patterns for the rest of the century.

In August, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) spelled out the intensity of the climate crisis affecting every region of the world because of human activity, and Ireland is no exception.

Scientists at the Irish Centre for High-End Computing (ICHEC), based at NUI Galway, have been using advanced technology to create climate models and simulations that indicate the impact of the climate crisis on Ireland by mid-century.

Their work has raised some concerning predictions for Ireland’s weather patterns in the coming decades, including more heatwaves, less snow, and increasingly unpredictable rainfall patterns – even by Irish standards.

Temperatures are set to increase by between one and 1.6 degrees Celsius relative to levels experienced between 1991 to 2000, with the east seeing the sharpest rise. Heatwaves, especially in the south-east of the country, are expected to become more frequent.

The simulations also found that the number of days Ireland experiences frost and ice will be slashed by half, as will the amount of snow that falls in winter. Rainfall will be more variable with longer dry and wet periods, and surface winds will become weaker.

‘Dramatic changes’

While the report suggests that a heating climate may be good for farming in Ireland – a significant contributor to the economy – it will also be accompanied by the rise of pests that can have potentially devastating effects on agriculture.

Reduced wind strength and unpredictable weather will have an impact on Ireland’s growing renewable energy infrastructure, which relies heavily on specific climate conditions to reach targets.

“A mean warming of two or three degrees Celsius does not seem like much, given that temperatures can vary by a lot more than that just from day to day,” said ICHEC climate scientists Dr Paul Nolan and Dr Enda O’Brien.

“However, even that amount of warming is likely to lead to widespread and even dramatic changes in ice cover – especially in the Arctic – to sea levels, and in the natural world of plants and animals.”

Ireland’s contribution

With machine learning and supercomputing, scientists are able to use historical climate data and observations to improve predictions of Earth’s future climate – and the impacts of the climate crisis.

Ireland is part of a consortium of several northern European countries that contribute to the IPCC reports by running global climate models that feed into the report’s assessment.

As part of the consortium, Nolan has conducted many centuries worth of global climate simulations using the EC-Earth climate model, which represents the most relevant physical processes that operate in the atmosphere, oceans, land surface and sea ice.

The simulations range from historical data – so the model can be compared to real climate records – to the end of the 21st century, with the aim of providing a comprehensive picture of climate trends and what the future could hold. The ICHEC research is funded and supported by the Environmental Protection Agency, Met Éireann and the Marine Institute in Galway.

“The level of detail and consistency achieved gives confidence in these projections and allows an ever more persuasive evidence-based consensus to emerge that humans are forcing rapid climate change in well-understood ways,” Nolan and O’Brien wrote in the Irish Times this week.

“How to respond to that consensus now is a matter primarily for governments, since they can have the most impact, as well as for individuals.”

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