Six Weeks Of Severe Gales–February 1990

By Paul Homewood

 

As Philip Eden noted a few years ago, the Burns Day storm was just the beginning of six weeks’ worth of severe gales, twelve all told, some with winds close to 100 mph even away from exposed coasts.

The Met Office called it a very windy month:

The  Met Office’s Full Weather Report for 1990 details the highest wind speeds each month, both for sustained and gust speeds:

https://digital.nmla.metoffice.gov.uk/IO_476be283-e544-44a0-8087-ecddc31ad5d9/

I have taken a geographically well spread selection and listed them below for February 1990:

	Wind Speeds mph
	Sustained	Gust
Stornaway	51	81
Aberdeen	40	63
Prestwick	44	72
South Shields	49	75
Gorleston	48	84
Stansted	38	75
Leeds	53	98
Oxford	48	82
Heathrow	33	70
Manchester	39	81
Valley	34	74
Aberporth	57	90
Avonmouth	53	79
Exeter	41	83

.

Bearing in mind that many of these locations are inland, and none are in abnormally exposed positions, on clifftops and so on which the Met Office nowadays highlight, the gust speeds are astonishing by today’s standards. And no part of the country escaped severe gales.

But it is the sustained winds that really stand out. These are mean wind speeds measured over 10 minutes each hour. Most of the country experienced at least one strong gale, as defined on the Beaufort Scale.

No storm this year has remotely approached these 1990 storms, never mind the Burns Day one. Probably the only one in recent years to even approach them was Eunice last year.

The Met Office assessed windstorm trends in their State of the Climate Report earlier this year:

https://rmets.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/joc.8167

The graph makes abundantly clear that the number of strong wind events in recent years is at their lowest since 1970, by whichever measure you use. This is a good indicator both of wind intensity and geographical coverage.