Mayo escaped worst of rainfall in January

Mayo was one of the coldest counties in Ireland during the month of January but rainfall in the west was down compared to other parts of the country.

Data for last month reveals that the county experienced one of the lowest average temperatures in the nation.

According to the statistics from Met Éireann, the weather station at Newport in West Mayo had 30 days of rain in January with only one day in the entire month avoiding rainfall.

However, the climate statement shows that, unusually, more rain fell in the east of the country than the west.

“Some [weather] stations in the north and west [of Ireland] were actually drier than average, but stations in the south and east were very much wetter than average," said Met Eireann climatologist Paul Moore.

Mean temperatures for the month in Mayo were recorded as 3.9 degrees Celsius at the weather station at Ireland West Airport, which was 0.4 degrees Celsius below the national average.

Last month was the wettest January in Ireland since 2018, according to Met Éireann.

Mr Moore said that a number of weather stations in the west of Ireland were drier than usual last month because "low pressure systems were coming in from the south ... and they were stalling to our south-west and just meandering northwards."

"So we had a lot of southerly and south-easterly airflow bringing up a lot of moisture from the south and those rainbands concentrated on the south and the east," he explained.  “In places like Belmullet in Mayo, it was closer to the high pressure that was to the north and they only had 88% of their long-term average rainfall.”

The east of the country has experienced extensive flooding in the past week, with counties like Dublin, Wicklow and Wexford, bearing the brunt of the heavy rainfall during the first week of February, but the west has escaped the worst.