NI To Escape Worst Of 'Monsoon' Floods

Northern Ireland looks set to miss Monsoon-style rainfall that has caused extensive flooding in the Irish Republic overnight.

On Thursday morning, Dubliners awoke to traffic chaos after torrential rain fell in the city in the early hours.

Officials said that the equivalent of 15 days of rain were recorded in one hour at Dublin Airport during a series of thunderstorms.

However, apart from some prolongued bursts moving across most parts of NI on Thursday, the province looks like missing the continued torrential rains that have hit across the border.

Short-term warnings of severe or extreme weather in some parts of Northern Ireland have however been issued by the Met Office.

But, while the Met Office said 15mm of rain is possible in a three-hour period and total accumulations are set to reach 30mm, it is not expected to be the prolonged downpours as experienced overnight in Dublin.

That will be relief for the NI Roads Service as a similar downpour last summer brought chaos to the then newly opened Westlink with flood waters reaching 20 feet in depth in an underpass.

Although tens of thousands of pounds were invested since then in anti-flood measures - to include a costly scale model to better analyse such incidents - officials will be glad they are not as sorely tested with such extreme conditions as in The Republic.

Last December, the scale model was commissioned of the contentious Broadway underpass as part of a plan to prevent a recurrence of last summer's severe flooding.

The £40,000 model, on a scale of one in 20 is about 10 metres by 10 metres and has taken almost six months to complete.

The latest weather forecasts indicate that while clouds will gather bringing showers or longer spells of rain during Thursday morning and some of these showers will be thundery - even leading to torrential downpours, especially in the west - the cloud cover should clear towards the end of the day leaving bright spells in the evening.

It also looks like the worst has passed as on Friday, weather watchers expect the day to be bright with some sunny spells.

Although there will also be some showers around, with the odd heavy one developing especially during the afternoon, nothing will come close to the massive downpours across the border last night.

See: Torrential Downpour Hits Rail And Roads

See: Westlink Floods As Scale Model Completed

See: Repeat Westlink Flood Warning Issued

(BMcC/JM)