Storm Ellen - 19th/20th August 2020

John.Icy wrote: »

I'm not too fussed over the IWC or similar people trying to put their 2 cents in - sensationalist forecasts are part and parcel of the hobby, though maybe in this case the large following is a little more dangerous. Agree with Oneric too, the media does this every day, and they actually phrase their articles as if its directly coming from Met Eireann - it's always ''Met Eireann predict massive heatwave'' despite the official forecast being 18-22 degree weather or that. At least IWC pushes himself as something separate and kind of, I am better than MetE.

Laughable though how his feed was full of praise this morning. General public hasn't a scooby doo. Whatever about Cork, and at a push Limerick/Clare, we had gusts elsewhere of 90-110 km/h. Just an absolute world away from 150-160 km/h gusts over a widespread area and supposed imminent red warning upgrades. IWC was bang on the money though apparently. These people in his comments praising him right now are the same folk who bash MetE for predicting winds of 120 km/h and the max gust only ends up being 119km/h. I could write a thesis how baffled I am how some people in inland Leinster for e.g. on his page have woke up this morning convinced they have just lived through a red warning historic storm with 150 km/h gusts. Christ.

thecomedian wrote: »

Well no one was killed by this storm, so it’s not as bad as some others in terms of impact

Bejubby wrote: »

He will be part of the government soon pushing climate change policies!!!��

Neddyusa wrote: »

Certainly worst storm impact wise here in over 23 years. Shows why ME need to go to an "impact" model.
Also the closest of those weather stations to us is over 40 miles away (Mt Dillon) - but thats story for another day.
ESB estimates we'll get power back on Saturday :eek:

teednab-el wrote: »

Ah here i doubt that. It might have been bad but nowhere near those levels.

nacho libre wrote: »

You are unlucky.
It was orange level in parts of East Galway, East Mayo and Roscommon. It was the strongest wind i've experienced in a long time. Although i was not here for Ophelia, so maybe that one was just as good/worst depending on your point view. As has been said M.T Cranium was on the money again. Can a Canadian become president? Or is that taking things too far:)

Hammer Archer wrote: »

Mace Head got Orange and borerline red wind speeds. I understand that that's very exposed compared to other parts of the county. However, if you look at the amount of trees down in this link, it certainly wasn't an ordinary wet and windy night.


All it takes is one tree down in the wrong place to cause a major power outage. And that could be the difference between one person thinking "this is the worst storm ever" and another a few miles down the road thinking "that was a nothing storm". It does, however, lend credence to the thinking that we should do away with county-wide warnings, though that in itself could cause it's own problems.
And Met Éireann do take the impacts of the weather into account, as is described on their website.

Personally I think Met Eireann got it right, more or less. It's still an inexact science and this storm in particular seemed to be very difficult to nail down even yesterday. I think the proof of that is that the amount of people that were bigging it up last night that they'd get it completely wrong are nowhere to be seen today.