20 Oct 2024 – Storm Ashley
Not a particularly memorable named storm, although it did manage to come in at #15 in the maximum hourly gale index of named storms since 2015.
20 Oct 2024 – Storm Ashley Read More »
Named Storms
16 Oct 1987 – The Great Storm
Only three hourly Synops I’m afraid, and many of them missing from the worst affected regions. At a glance, and from this limited SYNOPSYNOP SYNOP (surface synoptic observations) is a numerical code (called FM-12 by WMO) used for reporting weather observations made by manned and automated weather stations. SYNOP reports are typically mad hourly and consist of groups of numbers (and slashes where data is not available) describing general weather information, such as the temperature, barometric pressure and visibility at a weather station. data, although it looked a pretty windy night, you wouldn’t have thought it had been as severe as it was across the southeast of England. I’ve no idea if my hind sight analysis was anywhere close to the analysis on the day. I was an observer at Kinloss at the time, and missed all the excitement after being posted to Scotland that summer.
16 Oct 1987 – The Great Storm Read More »
23 Aug 2024 – Storm Lilian
Here are some random images, tables and animations that I posted regarding Storm Lilian to my Twitter account @xmetman. Nothing particularly devastating about the winds or the rain from the storm itself, which the Met OfficeUKMO The Meteorological Office is the United Kingdom's national weather service. It is an executive agency and trading fund of the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy should really have never named. It was gone in a flash, and although there were gusts in excess of 70 mph on the Lancashire coast, only eight SYNOPSYNOP SYNOP (surface synoptic observations) is a numerical code (called FM-12 by WMO) used for reporting weather observations made by manned and automated weather stations. SYNOP reports are typically mad hourly and consist of groups of numbers (and slashes where data is not available) describing general weather information, such as the temperature, barometric pressure and visibility at a weather station. stations recorded a gale. Gale Index wise the storm didn’t register above the 200 mark because of its size, with the extratropical cyclone that had been Hurricane Ernesto scoring much higher earlier in the week. I should have written a piece about Ernesto, but when you have so few followers as I have, I thought what’s the point 😪
23 Aug 2024 – Storm Lilian Read More »
A UK Gale Index
I’ve developed yet another Windows weather application, one that I have been meaning to write for several years now, it analyses reported hourly wind speed and gusts in SYNOPSYNOP SYNOP (surface synoptic observations) is a numerical code (called FM-12 by WMO) used for reporting weather observations made by manned and automated weather stations. SYNOP reports are typically mad hourly and consist of groups of numbers (and slashes where data is not available) describing general weather information, such as the temperature, barometric pressure and visibility at a weather station. observations from WMOWMO The World Meteorological Organisation is a specialized agency of the United Nations responsible for promoting international cooperation on atmospheric science, climatology, hydrology and geophysics. block #03, and produces a simple daily and hourly gale index [GIGI Gale Index] for all available stations below 250M, which usually ends up being around 150 sites across the UKUK The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Europe, off the north-western coast of the continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. and Ireland. I’ve done it to see how viable it would be for an organisation, such as the UKMOUKMO The Meteorological Office is the United Kingdom's national weather service. It is an executive agency and trading fund of the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, to come up with an objective, rather than a subjective way of naming storms. The screenshot above shows a data grid of hourly GI in the main form, with daily and hourly data from the 26th of September up to the 21st of December 2023. I have now analysed all hourly SYNOP data back to 2015, which is the year naming storms commenced in the UK.
The GI itself is very simple, and is just the sum of the mean Beaufort force for each station plus half the Beaufort force of it’s highest gust, from all stations for that hour. I’ve found that from looking at all previous named storms that an index of 100 equates to a gale and 200 to a named storm event. You can see the seven named storms we’ve seen since the start of the 2023/24 season. Using these values as a guide I can easily list all the named storms. Some of these were named other Met Services other than the UKMO, and a couple of the storms were named for their heavy rain rather that strong winds.
This is where the fun starts, because as you can see Pia, a storm named by the DMIDMI The Danish Meteorological Institute is the national meteorological service for Denmark and Greenland. on the 21st of December, had a maximum hourly GI of 709 which is at least twice as high as any of the previous named storm so far this season. It was eventually named, but surprisingly not by the UKMO. If you look down the table you’ll also notice storm Ciaran only had a GI of 169, and using the 200 threshold for storms as a guide it should not have been named. There are plenty more named storms like Ciaran that just didn’t make the grade. There are also other times when a GI exceeded 200 but that didn’t result in a storm being named. On looking back I’ve found that this often occurs when a low affects Scotland, and I beleive it’s because the UKMO link the naming of storms with their NSWWSNSWWS The National Severe Weather Warning Service is a service provided by the Met Office in the United Kingdom. The purpose of this service is to warn the public and emergency responders of severe or hazardous weather which has the potential to cause danger to life or widespread disruption. This allows emergency responders to put plans into place to help protect the public and also allowing the public to make necessary preparations.. Usually, but not always, if they issue an amber warning a storm automatically gets named, sometimes a yellow warning is all that’s required outside Scotland, but because the threshold for an amber strong wind warning is 80 mph (or higher) rather than 70 mph for elsewhere in the UK, amber warnings are rarer in Scotland. That’s the reason why I believe the UKMO didn’t choose to name Pia.
The next logical step is to break down the GI regionally because that’s it weakness.
Below is a ranked list of all the named storms since 2015 and all the missed events. As you can see I have also assigned each named storn a category from one to five. Ciara, a category five storm, had the highest maximum GI of any of them. In third place you’ll notice is the Ross-shire (or the unnamed) storm of January 2015 which I’ve included because it occurred just before the naming of storm commenced.
This application is still WIPWIP Work In Progress so ignore the mean column for now I will get round to fixing it.
Autumn 2023 [SON] – Objective Lamb Weather Types
Meteorological Autumn 2023 has seen some quite varied weather types, predominantly anticyclonic until mid October and then full on cyclonic. It also contained four named storms, some of which were more deserving than others for being named. I can’t even remember them all, only Ciaran and Debi stick out. Zonality also did a couple of about faces during October and again towards the end of November.
Autumn 2023 [SON] – Objective Lamb Weather Types Read More »
Storm Babet 18-21 October 2023
Not so much an item as a Twitter dump of stories, charts, graphs and images from tweets I wrote concerning Storm Babet. Not sorted out too well chronologically either. I’ll try to do better next time. Maybe I’ll stick with the blog and just upload links to Twitter from now on?
Temperatures & Anomalies
Rather cold in the NENE North East, much milder further south. Not a single mention of temperatures for today on the BBCBBC The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) is the national broadcaster of the United Kingdom, based at Broadcasting House in London. It is the world's oldest national broadcaster, and the largest broadcaster in the world by number of employees, employing over 22,000 staff in total, of whom approximately 19,000 are in public-sector broadcasting. too caught up on listing the number of flood warnings
Surface analysis
Something like that
13 UTC
Surface analysis
Surface analysis
Inverbervie is a notoriously windy place, but the E’ly gale that’s been running there for the last 31 hours must rank as one of the windiest spells the AWSAWS Automatic Weather Station there has ever recorded
A surprisingly dry and bright day with sunny intervals here in StrathpefferStrathpeffer Strathpeffer (Scottish Gaelic: Srath Pheofhair) is a village and spa town in Easter Ross, Highland, Scotland, with a population of 1,469. after yesterday’s afternoon rain, although it feels cold in the strong easterly wind.
Flooding on the A834 Strathpeffer to Dingwall road close to Castle Leod
Estimated accumulations from weather radar
The heavy rain has finally stopped after almost 13 hours. Quite remarkable accuracy with estimate of 43.1 mm for Strathpeffer, Vantage Pro reports 43.4 mm
Goodbye Babet
Three large rainfall events
6-8 Oct the storm that never was 87.6 mm 48hr
19 Oct storm Babet 32.6 mm in 16 hr
21 Oct 29.2 mm in 9 hr so far 192.4 mm
Inverbervie Anemograph
Mean Speed Average hourly [kts]
A 33 kt mean speed is not bad going for 72 hours at Inverbervie.
The wind has moderated slightly this morning but still blowing force 12 from SE’E. Temperatures now sub-zero and wind chill close to -12°C so it’s either white or has a very icy glaze up there at the moment
Glenshee Snow above 2500 ft today now clearing from southeast.
Amazing rain shadow cast by Cairngorms persists across Nairn & Forres. Kinloss 0.4 mm [06-18] Lossiemouth 0.8 mm [06-18]
Estimates from radar Had to change to high colour range contouring Purple pixels indicating wettest areas have seen >175mm in last 20 hrs across E Scotland, and close to the city of Aberdeen itself. 32.4mm in 14 hrs in Strathpeffer
Rainfall totals from weather radar estimates More white pixels appearing across E Grampians indicating totals of >80mm since 06 UTC. Ben Wyvis has some too as well. 17.4 mm since 13 UTC here in Strathpeffer in heavy rain.
Here’s a pseudo hyetograph for a spot close to the Bridge of Dee gleaned from 5 minute weather radar imagery. Estimates of 41.6 mm so far today.
Storm Babet 18-21 October 2023 Read More »
23 December 2016 – Fifty foot waves at K5
On 20 UTC on the 23 December 2016, instrumental wave heights reported by the automatic weather buoy [MAWS] K5 out in the North Atlantic at 59.1° north and 11.7° west were as high as 15.4 metres or just over 50 feet. Wave heights have since dropped to around 30 feet, before increasing again tomorrow as storm Conor passed close by to the north. Looking at the midnight chart I should imagine waves may have been considerably higher than this a little further north judging by the strength of the gradient. Sadly, since I wrote the original article the UKMOUKMO The Meteorological Office is the United Kingdom's national weather service. It is an executive agency and trading fund of the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy now suppress wave height data in their hourly weather buoy observations, so much for progress.
23 December 2016 – Fifty foot waves at K5 Read More »
2 August 2023 – Storm Patricia
Another Meteo FranceMeteo France Météo-France is the official service of meteorology and climatology in France. named storm, Patricia, the center of which ran fairly and squarely across the UKUK The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Europe, off the north-western coast of the continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. during Wednesday. Gusts of 40 to 50 knots are good going for early August across northern France, and I notice one as high as 56 knots at Meaulte to the NENE North East of Paris. The main feature wasn’t the wind across the UK so much but the heavy rain, particularly across the North and East of Yorkshire.
2 August 2023 – Storm Patricia Read More »
5 July 2023 | Storm Poly
After bringing storm force winds overnight to the Netherlands here’s a loop of satellite images showing Storm Poly, as it’s now been called by DWD, exiting stage right. So NMI don’t name it even though it brought storm force winds and gusts of 80 knots but the DWD do? What a crazy system. It could only happen in Europe. It’s been reported that the next name on the DWD list is going to be Storm Roly.
5 July 2023 | Storm Poly Read More »
Winter [DJF] 2023 – Objective LWT
I see there’s talk about how this winter has seen no named storms issued by the UKMOUKMO The Meteorological Office is the United Kingdom's national weather service. It is an executive agency and trading fund of the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy and it’s friends. That’s because the naming of storms is a subjective based system based on impact based warnings system, at least in the UKUK The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Europe, off the north-western coast of the continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.. True, it has been a quieter winter than average, especially in the first half of December, but that doesnt mean there’s been a shortage of candidates for named storms, but because nearly all only affected the north of Scotland and require the issuance of an amber warning, i.e. gusts of 90 mph or more, this didn’t happen. If the UKMO wanted, it could easily create an objective system based on regional NWPNWP Numerical weather prediction uses mathematical models of the atmosphere and oceans to predict the weather based on current weather conditions. data, then I think then, people might take it more seriously.
Winter [DJF] 2023 – Objective LWT Read More »
17 February 2023 – Storm Otto
Storm Otto was named by the DMIDMI The Danish Meteorological Institute is the national meteorological service for Denmark and Greenland. because the UKMOUKMO The Meteorological Office is the United Kingdom's national weather service. It is an executive agency and trading fund of the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy refused to issue an amber warning for strong winds for Scotland on Wednesday (15th). That left the way open for the DMI to step in and claim the storm as their own, despite the strength of the wind across Denmark in the afternoon being no stronger than it was in the early morning across the north and east of Scotland or northeast England. I have no idea what’s going on down at Exeter, but they certainly seem to have it fixed in their heads that amber warnings will only be issued for Scotland if wind speed exceed 90 mph, and because amber warnings trigger the naming of storms, that, and persistent high pressure in the south, is the reason why there’s been a paucity of them this autumn and winter across the UKUK The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Europe, off the north-western coast of the continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland..
17 February 2023 – Storm Otto Read More »
November 2022
I’m sure that there should have been at least one named storm across IONAIONA Islands Of North Atlantic. Yes I know there's an island called Iona, but this is so I don't have to use the term 'British Isles' when referring to the whole of Ireland and the UK. in such a windy month as November 2022 was. Even the French managed to come up with one – storm Claudio (31 October – 2 November).
