Is Ireland becoming less windy?

Thanks broken for me - looks slightly less broken when I turn off Boards.ie fixes extension - but still broken.

Very interesting - you might be onto something.

also, I remember the winters from the 80's to be much much wetter and windier - (maybe its because I did more cycling then) - for a large part of the summer I would look at the rain outdoors. Definitely milder now.

I've been thinking about this since the UK gas price crisis. Not enough power from wind and not enough fossil fuel backup and it's lights out. What a tragedy it would be to plan for abundant wind and then for Climate Change to give us abundant mildness instead. In Cop26 they talked about Europe wide networks and I guess this is key.

Good presentation there, not sure if it took a "thanks" or not as Oneiric3 was saying, but I tried.

Oneiric3 and sryanbruen have also posted various data more about storms than average wind speeds showing the same trends.

As for Mullingar having an even stronger decline in wind speeds, perhaps that is due to a combination of these factors -- if winds decrease slightly in general including over the nearby oceans, then Mullingar is probably the least maritime-influenced location overall and the slight decrease near coasts would translate to a bigger decrease there. Also you can get site contamination, like trees at a distance growing taller or urban development close to an airport weather station. Those things can artificially make some data change for reasons that are quite localized and not indicative of larger trends.

Not having any real chance to drive past Mullingar's weather station any time soon, I hope somebody better situated (which would be anyone reading this) could check that out. GL already pointed out how Shannon airport has perhaps become more of a heat trap due to the spread of parking areas near the instruments.

But I think that overall your hypothesis is sound and it is something I once called "global blanding" as a sort of reality check on the warmer and stormier concept. There's always some example available of storms increasing in severity as I can well attest living where I do, we just had an unprecedented amount of November rainfall, but also here on the Pacific coast wind speeds seem to be slightly on the decrease long-term and we get less frequent wind warnings than might have been the case in earlier years.

In some ways this is what one should really expect from a warming climate since the jet stream will be more frequently further north than it was decades ago, so that the intense storms that might have been more frequent then should now be tracking a bit further north. Also one of the factors that leads to storm intensification is a phasing of cold air aloft with a strong jet stream and there's no reason to think that this will be increasing even if you buy totally into the climate change theories. It should be a decreasing factor and that's how it seems from the actual data. Anecdotal data is widely misused in this area too.

This is the Mullingar station

County Westmeath - Google Maps

Comparing the aerial imagery of the area over time, some houses were built to the station's north and southeast since 1995, but they're not really close enough to greatly affect the mean wind, especially since the station remains well unobstructed to its southwest.

1995

2000

2005

Two years ago I did a dataset on national mean wind speeds for winters from 1957-58 to 2019-20. There was a clear downward trend to be had and even our stormiest winter of recent times (2013-14) did not quite reach the levels of some of the winters from the 70s to 90s despite having such a large number of storms. I have posted an updated version of the graph below containing Winter 2020-21.

The stations considered were Belmullet, Valentia Observatory, Mullingar, Casement Aerodrome/Dublin Airport, Rosslare/Johnstown Castle and Malin Head. Johnstown Castle was used for post-2008 years and Dublin Airport was used for pre-1964 years.

The 30-year national average went from 13 knots (1981-2010, the orange line) to 12.4 knots (1991-2020, the blue line), reflective of the drop in average wind speeds. This is in spite of the frequency of positive NAO winters this past decade including 2013-14, 2014-15, 2015-16 and 2019-20. Note that the years of 2009-10 and 2010-11 were exceptionally calm (due to a strongly negative NAO pattern in both years) so if we take out these big outlier years, the average values of their respective 30-year periods increase by only 0.2 knots. This trend is further evidenced by other old averages: 1971-2000 (13.7 knots) and 1961-1990 (13.5 knots). The most recent average from 1991-2020 is over a knot calmer than the oldest averages.

The windiest winter was 1989-90 with a national average of 15.9 knots whilst the calmest was 2009-10 with 8.6 knots.

That is very true indeed but even in my old Kildare location I was almost always too far west to benefit from the Dublin/Wicklow Mountains shelter that very often tends only to come into effect once you get to around Maynooth/Leixlip if heading east or west on the M4, especially when there's a south or southwest wind blowing. Cloudy and often wet until that area and then good sunshine on the Dublin side of the boundary. 12 years of driving that route in both directions has taught me that.

So I don't expect a massive change in regular day to day weather but I will welcome any sort of east or south east winds whenever they arrive. New location will benefit from slightly higher ground (about 30/40m) to the immediate east and northeast so that should provide even more shelter. There's also a hill to my south/southwest which is 100m higher than the house location so again, this may provide a small bit of shelter although it is more than two kilometres away so the amount of shelter will be very slight, if anything.

Once thing I will miss is Irish Sea Streamers as my old house location was often in a great spot for those. Still, I'd take lighter wind and higher temperatures ahead of snow or cold, any day!

On the plus side, your new location will benefit more from Arctic sourced snow showers (if we ever get such again, that is) On the negative side, you are going to experience a lot more looming cloud in all seasons! but which, on the plus side of that, can really bring out the mood of the great scenery in that part of the country.

As of yesterday, November's mean windspeeds are running at about 8.7 knots, which is 1.6 knots below normal, so another below average month regarding windspeed pretty much assured at this stage.

Credit: Met Eireann.

The lack of easterly winds in the Midlands, going by your memory, further supports my thoughts that Irish Sea breezes from late spring through summer do not not penetrate to the Midlands whilst they have done so on warm afternoons at my previous location about 40km away from the east coast.

Big thumbs up for me on that as I hate sea breezes with a passion, probably exasperated due to me enduring them for the first 26 years of my life when I lived a few hundred metres from the east coast. Way too often, a calm, warm and sunny May or June morning would turn into a windy and cold but sunny late morning and remain so until near sunset. The bitter wind would cut right through you, fresh off the still cold Irish Sea. And if the sea breeze did not develop, there would often be a thick sea fog. In either case, the temperature would often struggle to get into the teens when it could be into the 20s further inland.

Climate models have been predicting a decline in mean wind speeds across the northern mid latitudes due to climate change since at least 2017

This doesn't mean wind energy is not viable in the Atlantic northeast, it just means we need to plan for it

Also a reduction in the mean wind speed does not preclude more powerful storms. The science seems to be suggesting fewer windstorms in our region, but when windstorms do happen, they are likely to be more powerful than without climate change. Note, a storms 'power' is more than just it's max sustained wind, it also includes the size of the windfield and the amount of precipitation it brings and any storm surge that accompanies it.

https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/features/ClimateStorms/page2.php

Edit to post above. The values are actual mean speeds as opposed to gust speeds. Never before have I dealt with such an appalling laid out and vague (with ref to cell titles) dataset as this one.

But anyway, top 10 highest gust speeds and the year they occurred in in Vancouver