Will there be snow in Northern Ireland next week?

On February 16 a meteorological event occurred called a Sudden Stratospheric Warming (SSW).

This type of event was associated a cold spell of weather from 2018 called the 'Beast from the East' where an extreme form of an SSW occurred, triggering a type of weather pattern that lead to a period of cold weather.

At that time the 28 February 2018 was the coldest day during the event for Northern Ireland, with some locations never getting above 0C during the day.

Killylane for example only reached a max temperature of -2.1C that day. Stormont Castle only got to -0.2C. The most amount of snow lying I can see is 21cm at Glenanne on 2 March 2018.

The question is could the same thing happen again in the next week?

What is Sudden Stratospheric Warming in a nutshell?

This event takes place high in the stratosphere, above our everyday weather, around 30 km (20 miles) above the earths surface. Strong winds circulate around the pole from west to east.

Sometimes, these winds slow down and in 'severe' cases they can even reverse. Imagine stirring a cup of tea quickly, a small vortex develops.

As the water slows down it falls back into the centre and this happens high in the atmosphere. But not only does the air slow down it also heats up really quickly, sometimes up to 40C or more in one day. This can impacted weather at the surface, creating a blocked weather pattern.

This is what has brought our current weather pattern over the last week. High pressure has been centred to the north of Northern Ireland and it has led to fairly settled but cloudy conditions with only subtle difference in the day to day weather.

Next week brings a change

For the past few weeks it's been exceptionally dry across Northern Ireland , in fact for many western counties of Northern Ireland, there is a 75% deficit of rainfall for February.

This is largely due to the fact we've had high pressure dominating our weather - a blocked pattern.

This has stopped Atlantic Storm systems providing rain bearing clouds to move in, hence the weather has been very similar day on day.

As we move through the weekend, the high pressure system is set to move to westwards , allowing cold northerly winds originating from the Arctic to flood southwards.

By Tuesday next week the whole of the UK will experience a cold wave with the return of wintry hazards, including overnight frosts, ice as well as some sleet and snow.

From Sunday evening through to Thursday the 9 of March, there is some agreement among the various weather models that cold air will stay in place bringing a mix of rain sleet and snow showers. It is worth remembering that the nature of showers are very sporadic and so not everyone will see them but any showers that do occur are likely to be wintry (a mixture of rain sleet and snow).

The Met Office is likely to issue weather warnings for these wintry hazards, you can find these here.

The output from current weather models also seem to broadly agree that milder air will eventually push in by Friday and towards the weekend of the 11 of March.

At time of writing, there is a 20% chance of some more disruptive snow occurring next week, although there's still a lot of uncertainty regarding this.

So, in summary, there will be a cold spell with some snow showers at first before mild air pushes back in again. .

Plus, as we move through March, the sun starts to gain more and more strength everyday and so the colder snowy weather should become less likely.

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