Storm Agnes In Pembrokeshire
By Paul Homewood
In yesterday’s post, this comment was left about Storm Agnes. So I wondered if I had missed something.
The Met Office’s obsession with extreme wind speeds in highly exposed and upland sites diverts attention away from what is going on down below, where we all happen to live.
It is of course human nature to blur out the past and think that everything nowadays is bigger, worse/better, wetter/drier and so on than in the past.
So I have taken a look at Milford Haven, which on the south coast of Pembrokeshire would have borne the brunt of the southerly winds from Agnes. I doubt whether anywhere else in the region would have experienced stronger winds, unless in unusually exposed locations.
https://www.timeanddate.com/weather/@2642534/historic
Sustained wind speeds peaked at 32 mph during the storm, which puts it on the borderline between a strong breeze and a near gale on the Beaufort Scale:
Wind speeds of this level are commonplace in the UK, and certainly so on exposed coasts.
There’s no evidence either from the Met Office that rainfall was particularly high in South Wales, with the heaviest rain falling in N Ireland and Scotland:
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
I saw the comment and wondered: these two (if in fact there are two people posting – sympathy votes him for old couples…) have never posted here before. They’re in their late 80s yet they have found a fringe (apologies – I think it much more than that) blog and got themselves registered to make a comment. Yeah, sure.
Maybe their son/daughter is employed at the big organisation in Exeter which used to provide employment in Bracknell?!
🤔
Thing is, if we really have to base our whole economic strategy on the high winds/bad weather/etc on one couple’s recollection on it, why can’t I, who hardly felt much more than a bluster, have my say? It’s like September broke all records for warming when it turns out to be an atmospheric plume from the Sahara over Europe- which is not unusual. Then again, according to the BBC, it was all of 0.5C warmer than normal! We’re all gonna die…..!!
I grew up in north Pembrokeshire and can attest that southwesterly gales are common and fierce. In the Great Storm of 1859, some 50 ships were wrecked around the Pembrokeshire coast alone, and some 130 around the Irish Sea, including the Royal Charter, after which the storm is named. The church of St Brynach in Cwm yr Eglwys, where I lived, was mostly washed away in the storm. Only the west wall survives, along with the part of the graveyard which survived, many skeletons being lost to the sea
Milford Haven itself is somewhat sheltered (clue: it’s in the name), being in an estuarial valley. A rather more exposed site is St Ann’s Head at the entrance to the harbour. There is a weather station at the rock offshore:
51° 40.315 N 5° 9.826 W.
Unfortunately, the easily accessible weather record doesn’t stretch back quite far enough.
https://stannsweather.org.uk/wind.asp
Where were they when the Burns Day storm struck in January 1990? The strongest gust of 107mph was recorded in Aberporth which is right on top of Pembrokeshire. Something fishy here ( not Michael).
The strongest gusts I can find in Pembrokeshire via Ventusky are just over 70mph on the high ground near Rosebush.
https://www.ventusky.com/?p=51.960;-4.839;11&l=gust&t=20230927/1500
Is it kmh? That’s what the key says
You can change the units by clicking on the white rectangle at the head of the scale: it offers mph, kph, m/sec, Beaufort…
You can mouse over the map and it will show the wind speed for your mouse pointer in your chosen units.
Thanks, but when I clicked on the link I only got todays weathet
Perhaps I should add that you can set sustained wind speed form the left hand menu, for comparison with the gust values.
I don’t know why you didn’t get the weather for the 27th Sept – I do when I click on it. Easy enough to change the date – click and you get up a calendar. Here are the parameters to ventusky.com/ in the link as posted:
?p=51.960;-4.839;11&l=gust&t=20230927/1500
p is obviously the map centre in latitude and longitude and 11 is the zoom level. Gust is the weather data to be mapped, and t is obviously date and time (in GMT).
To be fair, it was on my phone.
It flashed up the 27th for a nanosecond, and then turned to current!
Checking the wind speeds (rather than gusts) for the area we are at bare gale force – maximum is 35mph. Which is what you would expect. The highest sustained winds on the coast were only a few mph higher at around 40mph.
Had they recently moved there from Surbiton?
We have more technology available to analyse everything than ever before.
Yet, we’d rather use unsubstantiated word-of-mouth interviews with people who up until a knock at the door – were quite content watching Countdown over a packet of digestives.
What next? Alf & his porch pinecones?
I doubt Mr and Mrs Evans actually exist as 80yr olds by those names. Until their identities are verified I’ll file it under spoof disinformation.
Furthermore, if they do exist they obviously dont have a clue what they’re talking about. I experienced frequent 60mph plus wind days when i lived in Pembrokeshire.
I have been out sailing in the Irish Sea in 33knots plus a bit and no one remarked on it. That was in the early 2000s when I still owned my fabulous little Hunter Pilot 27, a superb sea keeper. This storm can be no big deal.
St Ann’s Head’s weather station is sighted on
top of a shear 200ft cliff at the entrance of Milford Haven. It often records very high wind speeds ( over 90mph) is not too unusual in a storm. No mention in the news of record wind speeds at St Ann’s Head this time.
As it happens my wife and I were visiting grandchildren in Pembrokeshire, just along the coast from Fishguard when Agnes allegedly hit.
Aside from one night when it rained very hard indeed for a few minutes, the weather was actually much better than the forecasts predicted, some showers but nothing to prevent us enjoying our visit.
Perhaps Mr and Mrs Evans were in a different Pembrokeshire to the one we were in.
The drive down from Yorkshire was pretty rough over the first half however, got a bit more like submarining than motoring on the M6 in fact.,
“was actually much better than the forecasts predicted” for extremes of any sort this is almost invariably the case. I think it is a deliberate ploy so the majority remember the forecast and not the actuality. It may have started as a reaction to “there’s no hurricane” but has been hijacked by the climate armageddon cult.
Exactly, ‘they’ have already got us talking about made up storms via the cunning ploy of naming them.
St. Agnes’ Eve—Ah, bitter chill it was!
The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold;
The hare limp’d trembling through the frozen grass,
And silent was the flock in woolly fold:
Quite puzzling. Agnes had gone by late morning and we wondered what all the fuss was about. Worst storm ever? I think not.
I was on holiday on the north coast of Cornwall, Polzeath.
Agnes was a damp squib, a little breezy with light rain.
Well I live in Pembrokeshire and in the midst of storm Agnes went swimming in the sea at Whitesands Bay near St Davids. Despite the dire warnings of the Met Office it was a damp squib of a storm and no more than windy weather so typical of this descent into Autumn. Normally with a decent storm the road will be blocked at Newgale as the shingle bank is overtopped and deposited on the road.
I live in South Wales and all we had was breezy day and light rain….pretty normal.
Mark Carney is getting a pasting in the comments over at the DT:
“Sunak made a mistake with net zero changes, says Mark Carney”
MC would complain, wouldn’t he. He’s got a lot to lose.
There is a consequence to constant media climate propaganda. People over 80 are not immune. Also remember we are in the era of “lived experience” regardless of the individuals ability to analyze critically what they lived through. Also II, memory is not linear and is plastic.
I was talking with a retired doctor last week who hit me with the hockey stick which he had seen regurgitated in Nature he said not long ago. His take was “Nature is authoritative so anything published their is peer reviewed yada yada yada”. I took him through a critique of that scurrilous piece of work by the man with no shame, Mann explaining that better people than I have written detailed scathing criticisms of the farrago he produced. At the end of it I do not think he was convinced until I got him onto the subject of the problems with the peer review process and also falsifiability of claimed experiments in medical journals like the BMJ something my father was fiercely critical of more than 30 years ago. Once I pointed that out he began to think.
Basically his ability to judge was based on his experience……….WELL! Who would have guessed that…… so in that context, why I ask again does the BBC insist on using people with Arts degrees to push alarmist piffle and comment on climate …or is it klymutt? Just look up the infamous Georgina Rannard’s job title with the “impartial” BBC and then look at her education on Linkedin.
Lend him a copy of ‘A Disgrace to the Profession’ by Mark Steyn (all quotes from top profs. at top universities). I’ve found it very effective.
Ta for reminding me Nigel!
Pleasure, Ioannidis reckons that 50% of published scientific research is bogus rising to 67% in medical research (where there is even more money on offer). Fake Nobel Laureate Mann’s case against Steyn is finally getting into court in DC it seems, should be interesting if it finally does after 10+ years (starting with Mann admitting that he was not a Nobel Laureate as initially claimed).
Dr Kendrick – and others – agree 100% from what I have read, including an article in the Lancet some time ago or am I dreaming that?
As Phoenix44 and I sarcastically responded to the original post, it was clearly a bogus wind up by someone trying to distract on this thread. There really is no point in discussing the “possibilities” as it was totally fictional. Noteworthy that these fictional posters have not responded further but then as they simply do not exist they can’t really.
I also so as problematical the current Met Office obsession with extremes which they seek out with alacrity. The fact they do it is one thing, but then to not put it into context is simply using their position of authority to lie by omission and this needs calling out. I note, like the BBC and that other mob of charming lefties in the Grauniad they repeatedly misused and misreport statistical output. Why do they need to do this if as they say, the cyense is settled?
What happened to the 40C plus temperatures banded about as being a distinct possibility this summer? I think it was the Met that started that scare story.
I sort of vaguely remember something happened in October 1987, but of course I might be totally mistaken….
As the late Queen said, memories vary…. But I probably got that wrong too…..
Recollections
Thank you.
Recollected that earlier today whilst driving home…….
Slightly off-topic but just listening to our local (BBC) news and it would seem leaves on the line is now due to Climate Change!! You really couldn’t make it up!!