The Irish news today has been dominated by the arrival of Storm Chandra on these shores, accompanied by strong winds, heavy rain and widespread flooding. The whole country has been under a yellow alert, which will last until 11pm today.
The fact that it had been raining very heavily for days before the storm must have saturated the ground, which would have contributed to the flooding. Unusually, the worst has been on the East Coast, with Counties Wexford, Wicklow, Carlow, and Dublin badly hit. Usually it’s the West of Ireland that bears the brunt of storms which typically come from across the Atlantic.
It’s been a strange day in Maynooth because, despite the storm, the weather hasn’t been too bad at all. There was a long window this morning during which it was actually quite sunny and pleasantly mild, though a bit breezy. The picture on the left shows the situation in mid-morning when the prevailing wind was southerly.
The main mass of raincloud to the North had passed over us by then, and the small but intense strip off the Louth/Dublin coast missed Maynooth entirely. You can see a big gap. Rain was heading towards us from the South, and did reach us in the afternoon, though it wasn’t particularly severe. It remained reasonably warm throughout the day, though it is much colder now (I’m writing this at about 7.30pm).
Dublin is only about 25km from Maynooth and it was a surprise to see major flooding, with parts of the M50 flooded for a time while we experienced nothing particularly severe. Not that I’m complaining!
For more about Storm Chandra, including animations of its progress can be found here. It seems that Great Britain had a lot of weather to contend with!
In the Dark 