Aisling Creevey: Rainfall the concern as Storm Babet heads to Northern Ireland

Storm Babet could potentially bring between two and three weeks worth of rainfall overnight.

The storm system unusually has easterly winds, which means eastern slopes are likely to experience the highest rainfall totals. Counties Antrim and Down as well as areas surrounding the Sperrin Mountains are likely to see the highest of the rainfall totals.

There are usually very strong winds associated with storm systems that cross Northern Ireland and while there has been wind gusts of up to 50mph already, it is the amount of rainfall that is of concern.

As we have seen so many times in the past, you can predict with high accuracy the amount of rainfall but the difficulty is often trying to understand what might happen rainfall as it is fed into catchments.

Often it is localised flood waters that people underestimate the depth of and so iterating the message to not drive through flood waters is always very important.

A yellow weather warning for heavy rain is in place until Thursday morning at 10am. At that point the heavies of the rain will start to clear.

Weather models are indicating 30-50 mm of rain could fall with the possibility of 75-100 mm over the higher ground of Down and Antrim. This equates to about three weeks worth of rainfall.

Initially it had been thought we would get more.

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