Great Irish Snowstorms in History

Danno

Opening this thread to facilitate @_NAGDEFY_ 's fantastic collection of newspaper articles.

System

This discussion was created from comments split from: Winter 2021/2022 - General Discussion.

Elmer Blooker

Brilliant stuff NAGDEFY!

I believe the greatest snowfall in Ireland is said to have been in Jan 1814 which was also the winter of the last Thames Frost Fair

Another big one was in 1784 or 1786? when it was reported that ‘people couldn’t leave their houses in Dublin’ because of the depth of the snow, 1855 and 1895 are other ones that I know off.

That heavy snow in Nov 1807 was in a NW gale so I presume it was a polar low - something that doesn’t happen now.

Elmer Blooker

Probably the best account of winter 1739-40 is book called ‘Arctic Ireland, the forgotten famine’

It seems that snowfall wasn’t particularly heavy that winter and it was the extreme frosts that caused the famine.

Orion402

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118448903#Comment_118448903

https://bruener45.wixsite.com/britishislesclimate/post/winter-1739-40-the-great-frost

Larbre34

"Even in rooms facing to the South and with fires lit in them, sponge and water jug, were frozen"

How wonderfully descriptive.

Elmer Blooker

Unbelievable! 6 feet of snow in the streets and roofs caving in.

What would I give to see weather charts that caused that. I wonder how the rest of the country was affected?

Elmer Blooker

Accounts from London report very dense freezing fog during the last week of December 1813 which was cleared by a northerly wind followed by vast snowfall. It’s likely an anticyclone drifted towards Greenland?

It makes me wonder if there might have been a series of polar lows because it was from the north? Of course we’ll never know.

Billcarson

The archive charts on meteociel go back to 1836, I wonder will they go back further at some stage?

Xmas day 1836 looked like a chilly one. Must have been plenty of snow on the continent that Xmas.

Billcarson

Roll on 2 days to Dec 27th 1836 .

 A teenage Queen Victoria found it inconvenient, writing on December 27, 1836, ‘snow very deep and very cold… I am very much annoyed not to have been able to get out now for two days’.

It must have been extremely cold on the 29th under that high pressure if it was a mostly clear high given the upper air temperature. Wonder how cold it would have been at the surface??