Provisional Data For The North Sea Storm
By Paul Homewood
A few statistics are becoming available for the North Sea storm on Thursday, which I have seen described as the “worst for 60 years”.
So for a bit of perspective, below are the wind speed details from the Met Office.
http://metofficenews.wordpress.com/
This would appear to put the wind speeds just below those that hit Scotland in January 2012. (89 knots = 103 mph. The best comparison is probably in Lanarkshire, where 84 knots = 97 mph).
As can also be seen, the wind speeds experienced in 1998 were much greater.
Perhaps the most notable fact regarding this year’s storm was that strong winds came down as far south as Yorkshire.
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climate/uk/interesting/2012_janwind
There have been many reports of “140 mph” winds bandied about in the media, but it is worth reading the Met Office comment above again:
Some very high level mountain sites have reported speeds of over 140mph, but these are in very exposed areas and not representative of the winds most people have experienced.
Plainly then, the storm, as far as wind strength goes, was not an uncommon one in Scotland.
Storm Surge
What, of course, made this storm damaging was the storm surge, coinciding as it did with spring tides. Most storms take different tracks to this one, and therefore don’t create such a strong surge. Unfortunately, this one was in the wrong place and at the wrong time.
There have been misleading reports, such as this one from the BBC, that the surge “worse than 1953”, when the East Coast floods were described by the Royal Society as “worst national peacetime disaster to hit the UK.”
More accurately, the Environment Agency report that “The surge, which saw around 1,400 properties flooded, resulted in record sea levels, which in places were higher than those seen during the devastating floods of January 1953.”
1953 Floods
While we are making comparisons with 1953, it is worth looking at the wind speeds back then.
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/media/pdf/i/t/East_Coast_Floods_-_31_January_1953.pdf
The Orkney figure is probably a bit of an outlier, but the Lossiemouth and Dyce measurements, (both low lying, airfield sites) are much higher than anything recorded this year.
St Jude’s Day Storm Update
The Met Office have now published their report on the St Jude’s Day storm, that hit southern England in October.
As I mentioned at the time, the storm was heavily overhyped in the media. I will be putting out a full post tomorrow, but it is worth highlighting these comments from the Met.
This storm is judged to be within the top ten most severe storms to affect southern England in the autumn in the last 40 years. However, it was not in the same category as the Great Storm of 16 October 1987.
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
Sadly no wind turbines were blown down. What a shame.
Interesting mention of the little ice age near the beginning of the article.
Click to access weatherv3.pdf
Then there’s November 1665 (look down roughly a quarter of the page date on the left). http://booty.org.uk/booty.weather/climate/1650_1699.htm
Not forgetting 1236 (again a quarter of the page down) once again in November which did great damage. http://booty.org.uk/booty.weather/climate/1200_1299.htm also 1287 lower down killed 500.
It’s all too much for me and I haven’t scratched the surface. Just by typing in “storm surges uk 17th century” for starters and all this information reveals itself. Oh here’s more. http://booty.org.uk/booty.weather/climate/1400_1499.htm
Just pressing f3 and searching surge helps.
Keep up the brilliant work NAOPKT.
Satellite data is a little sparse for the examples quoted.
About 35 or 40 years ago there was a report of a driver being killed in the Orkney Islands when his car was blown off the road and over a cliff. The newspaper reported it was a local custom to load a couple of hundred pounds of rocks or coal into cars just to keep them from becoming airborne. Any Orcadian must know more about flying cars than I do, so unless there are reports of exceptional winds from the Islands we can be sure this storm was not unprecedented.
I’ve been in 80 mph wind and could hardly breath or walk. I’ve heard one is in danger being in wind stronger than about 70 mph as things start to blow around and cause injuries.
The BBC were quoting the 140 mph wind “in Scotland” without, as far as I could see, specifying the location.
Also they were referring to the “storm surge” and the “the tide surge” without clearly distinguishing between the two. There have been increasing reference (mainly on radio) to sea level rise with the obvious intention of associating that with the event. I suspect that the result will be general confusion among the public as to what was the major contributing factor,
It is important to know how much was caused by the “tide surge” because that was predictable and I don’t recall hearing any mention of flood warnings in the media until Thursday, by which time it was almost too late,
Philip Eden in todays’ Telegraph confirms that it was the worst storm in the North since Jan 2012.
Wow, that’s almost a year!
Oops! I mean ‘almost two years’. 🙂
Hmm, I can confirm that!
Typo alert! 84kts = 97 mph
Thanks, corrected.
Unfortunately, the train has left the station as far as headlines and incompetent newspaper articles are concerned. Reporters seem hard pressed to grasp the concept of a tide let alone a tidal surge or the inverse barometer.
The Daily Mail had a corker yesterday – probably worth a PhD to correct it.
See for yourselves. A point not generally mentioned is the wind was from the west so on the east coast it was offshore. The very heavy winds were forecast close to the Norwegian coast.
Glen Ogle went phut after 8am (comms/power fail maybe) when it was getting 60mph mean and 100mph gust but what gusts mean is a long and unclear contentious story. (see WMO wall sitting)
I have a capture of Met Office hourly data for mainland stations, experimental plot software allowed to autoscale http://tallbloke.files.wordpress.com/2013/12/storm-2013-12-05.pdf 730KB
St Jude’s day, had something fairly comprehensive in draft for some time.
I don’t know about the sixth years statement, But I’ve seen recorded 100+mph 3 times in the North Sea Brent Field in ’74, ’75 ’77 or ’78 and Magnus in ’82 aboard Semac 1.