The Beast from the East and drought of summer 2018: an example of compound event impacts upon Ireland's agricultural sector

Abstract

AbstractThe most noticeable and damaging manifestation of human‐induced climate change is the increasing likelihood of certain extreme weather events. As defined in the IPCC sixth assessment report, compound extremes can lead to extreme impacts that are much larger than the sum of the impacts due to the occurrence of individual extremes alone. Of these compound weather events, events occurring in close succession have received the least attention to date. In this paper, we explore such a case study of successive events affecting the agricultural sector in Ireland arising from the winter storm of 2018, dubbed the ‘Beast from the East’, followed by the drought of summer 2018 which combined yielded a substantial reduction in agricultural productivity over 2018.