Storm Ellen - 19th/20th August 2020

SLP 967 mb at Shannon (00z) southeast wind indicates centre is probably just slightly west of them although may be a case of twin vortices (one over Tarbert area, one over southern Lough Derg, possibly).

As to ECM performance, these inland wind predictions almost never seem to verify at weather stations but they may verify at locations on hills where weather stations are not situated. So I tend to factor that into model predictions for inland locations, the warnings need to be understood to be worst case conditions within the geographical area for that one unlucky person in a thousand who is more exposed to the hazards.

I don't expect any inland stations to do much more than 100 km/hr but when we asked for some people in the east Cork west Waterford area to report, they began to do so and in some cases have not followed up, possibly due to power failures (if you are on a mainframe for example or your internet service dies), so in fact the worst affected locations may not report in to us in real time, we may find out tomorrow what happened in a few spots.

My guess is that some fairly substantial damage occurred in that area, we're hearing more from people on the margins who got moderately strong winds and a few who got very strong winds but managed to stay on-line.

Anyway I hope everyone emerges unscathed from this, while many parts of the country would say it was no big deal, that one area has clearly experienced a major weather event. A track somewhat further east would have put Waterford city in a stronger wind zone also.