A band of light rain, sleet and snow will extend slowly southeastwards across Ireland tonight and during Thursday morning giving accumulations in places.
Met Éireann has issued a snow and ice alert for all 26 counties. The forecaster says snow and ice will lead to treacherous conditions with some accumulations possible. The alert is in place until 10:00am on Thursday.
Met Éireann and the UK Met Office have also both issued Low Temperature/Ice warnings for tonight as temperatures are forecast to drop to -3 or -4 °C.
Commenting on tonight's snow risk, IWO Senior Forecaster Peter O'Donnell said, "Rain or sleet will move into parts of west Ulster and north Connacht, turning to snow further inland, where potentially 3-5 cm could accumulate by morning, most likely from central Connacht into the midlands. Partly cloudy to overcast elsewhere with isolated wintry showers; the mixed precipitation with snowfall potential will reach some parts of the east and inland south by morning."
"Tomorrow, the snow or sleet will continue to make gradual progress southeastward with more areas seeing 1-3 cm accumulations, more mixed or melting wintry falls near coasts. Once this band has passed, winds will pick up from a northerly direction with bands of wintry showers and further snowfall potential as the air mass will be quite cold, with morning temperatures near -1 °C not moving up very much all day, highs 2 to 4 °C. There is some potential for locally heavy snow showers in parts of Leinster," added Peter.
Tuesday night was the coldest night of the winter so far with four of Met Éireann's synoptic stations recording temperatures lower than the previous record set in Dunsany, County Meath on December 7th (-4.7 °C). The coldest locations were Markree Castle in Sligo (-6.3 °C), Athenry in Galway (-6.1 °C), Mount Dillon in Roscommon (-5.2 °C) and Gurteen in Tipperary (-5.2 °C).
