Deluge puts spotlight on flooding

THIS time last year one story dominated the news – the appalling weather, especially flooding in the west and south, notably Cork.

Between the summer of 2009 and the summer of 2010, Ireland experienced a remarkable run of weather disasters and freak natural occurrences. The summer of 2009 broke all sorts of rainfall records, while November was the wettest month in more than two centuries in many parts of the country.

To make things worse, we were hit a short time later by snow, frost and temperatures that fell to be below -15° Centigrade. Some of this extreme weather – the high summer rainfall in particular – was not supposed to happen if projections on climate change were correct. If anything, we are supposed to have much drier summers as the century progresses.