Heavy rain on way for holiday weekend

Anyone planning an outdoor escape for the bank holiday weekend may be better off sneaking out of work early, with today's reasonably…

Anyone planning an outdoor escape for the bank holiday weekend may be better off sneaking out of work early, with today's reasonably high temperatures expected to give way to dismal weather over the weekend.

Temperatures should rise into the low 20s this morning as a warm front passes through the country, but a cold front is expected to chill the northwest this evening before it sinks in the southeast.

It will cause "quite a lot of rain during Saturday, maybe even very significant rains", said David Rogers, a meteorologist with Met Éireann.

"And when I say serious amounts, at least 25mm and possibly 50mm during the day," said Mr Rogers.

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"It's too early to tell where and when, but the balance of probabilities says that Munster will receive very heavy precipitation during Saturday." Temperatures will be in the high teens or early 20s.

After that, the weather is anyone's guess. Met Éireann says Sunday could be slightly brighter and a little colder than Saturday, but the remnants of a tropical storm off the US coast is making life difficult for the weather service's hard-working forecasters who are trying to provide a degree of certainty for Monday's bank holiday.

"The basic answer is we don't know what is going to happen on Monday - nobody does," said Mr Rogers.

"One thing we can say for certain is that it is not likely to be a dry day - there's likely to be lot of cloud, and at the very least showers around the country.

"There's the potential for heavier, more persistent bouts of rain, but as for where, when and how long, we just don't know." It is unusual to have such a high degree of doubt, said Mr Rogers.

"The main trigger for the doubt at present is that there was a transition from a tropical cyclone off the east coast of North America which possibly wasn't assimilated correctly into global models," said Mr Rogers.