Carlow forecaster is playing down the chances of another ‘Beast from the East’

A local forecaster is playing down the chances of another ‘Beast from the East’ in the near future.

He says a weather pattern known as a Sudden Stratospheric Warming event appears to be happening over the north pole.

A previous one preceeeded the original beast in 2018 but Alan O’Reilly from Carlow Weather says it’s just as likely to bring other weather conditions:

“I’m pretty confident we’re going to have an Sudden Stratospheric Warming event.  The next thing all the headlines we’ll hear is this happened in 2018 and we had the ‘Beast from the East’ and that is true.”

“But we also had a sudden stratospheric warming event in 2019 and we had no ‘Beast from the East’ and we had no cold.  It’s not one equals the other.”