Storm Jorge : February 29th

Sundew wrote: »

Pretty sure it's not the same "storm" he filmed as cabin doesn't disappear under a wave of sea spray. I regularly take photos/ videos of the same place on different days. Great footage all the same.

It is nothing but a promo for samsung which is unusual for him its normally the god of all phones the iphone

RoisinD wrote: »

As are the snippy, passive aggressive posts and comments. Childish behaviour. Why are some so bothered? If you don't like a particular poster put them on ignore. Getting tiresome.

If it is 'getting tiresome' then take your own advice and press ignore, rather than wagging your finger at others.

The issue is sensationalism in our media. There is very little reporting as an informative nature, but rather outlets competing with one another to out do each other.

I’m the age of global warming the narrative has been set that rains are heavier, winds stronger and catastrophe always looming. With this in place all weather is over inflated to the point that what was once ordinary is now extraordinary.

People have lost trust in the media, in time they will need to correct their ways or public forums like this will replace them as a source of reliable information.

weisses wrote: »

I found the storm much worse here in west Kerry during the afternoon... some nasty gusts...

I agree. It became really squally. Very hard to walk in.

Widdershins wrote: »

Either my house is in my own little twilight zone (which would explain my life) or my hedges are really doing their job. No sign of a storm here in my part of mid Clare yesterday.

Topology, hedges, buildings etc have a major effect on whether you experience the full wack or not and of course wind direction. Our ancestors knew the best place to build a homestead. Our cottage is a perfect example, during Ophelia a shed in the neighbours field(200yards away) had it's galv roof torn off, opened like a tin of beans. At our place nothing budged, old slate roof, loose sheets of galv all stayed put.

Similar with watching the flood coverage, while a family had built a barrier of sandbags around their bungalow, you could see an old abandoned farmhouse in the background, it was built on higher ground many metres above the high flood level.

Edit: There probably are old venacular dwellings that are flooded too, however these would have been built before our bogs were destroyed.

We've lost so much knowledge.

Maybe some of the disconnect in this discussion comes from the fact that our weather forum chose (several years ago) to tag the threads with the highest level of alert issued by Met E. This may create an impression that the weather forum endorses the warning levels and the system of county by county warnings.

There is no actual behind the scenes structure to this weather forum that could justify any such assumptions. People have fallen into certain roles, more by the absence of anyone else who wants to fill them. We don't have some committee assigning tasks or responsibilities. The decision to follow Met E warnings came after a period when individual thread starters were randomly assigning what they thought should be the alert levels. With both Darwin and Ophelia we were having some background chats among half a dozen mods and leading posters, about when to go red. If I remember correctly, we actually went red with Darwin before the met service did. With Ophelia we were into the co-ordinated alert era.

The only thing likely to improve if we went back to the old system (where we called the alert level ourselves) might be that we would probably twin these independent alerts to maps showing where they applied. If you're going to go independent, your first move would probably be to free yourself up from the county by county problem.

OTOH, you would introduce the element of the decision-maker(s) coming up with a less accurate overall alert structure than the Met (even after the county by county handicap). This might be a source of derision if we overdid it, and serious legal trouble for Boards.ie if we underdid things. Even over at IWO, we take the same approach -- better to co-ordinate and hope for a good performance, than to issue independent warnings as some do, and end up with bad results and trouble that can be avoided by saying, "this is the official alert, take it or leave it."

But we can improve the status quo by issuing interpretations of the alerts that attempt to pinpoint the actual boundaries.

Timing is a separate issue. It was fairly obvious from most of the guidance that north Mayo, Sligo, north Leitrim and west Ulster would be waiting a long time to get into the stronger winds, and when they did, the storm might be in a declining phase. I'm not sure if a lot of the public whether interacting with our thread or not, caught that detail, but I think the met service warnings did.

I hope we have one more interesting storm because I am eager to try to upgrade our response in the ways described, if the moderators permit. But I think we are stuck with the overall structure of colour coding our threads in lock-step, otherwise we are openly saying we think we can do better. Maybe we can and maybe we cannot. The past record on that is mixed.

So I think it has been a good discussion to have, it's natural that people who do put forward an effort here might think, well if we're going to read ambiguous criticism of forecasts, let's at least put out our own forecasts rather than having a hybrid system of partly their forecasts, partly our own, and hope it all blends into one comprehensive united entity. Sometimes as with Ophelia there are fairly sharp differences of opinion (as we had for areas likely to be west of its track). With this past event, differences were more subtle and I don't know if six different people had been asked to make independent forecasts, perhaps three would have been improvements and three would be non-improvements.

question for sryanbruen -- can you link to where you first ranked the storms from before the original set we ranked? I would like to see how directly the index values compare. If those storms exceeded recent ones even with a handicap of fewer locations to add up points, I would suggest a correction factor but I don't know what would be an accurate one without seeing the stations in play. Thanks.

watlantic wrote: »

Below image is of one of the last squally showers in Clew Bay heading for Westport this evening:

If Paul Henry had been a photographer, he'd have been proud of that one!

back as far as start of 2019

Sryanbruen, what I was asking, when you added a few historic storms to the index, how many stations went into the index values and what if any reduction did that lead to, for those older events, as compared to the list of stations you use more recently?

Just a question as to direct comparison of the index values. I suppose if it's a case where now there are a few more inland places that rarely get above yellow, and otherwise it's 1:1, then the older storms would not be reduced very much. If on the other hand there are one or two more places where a storm can often score 3-4 points, compared to those earlier storms, then we should probably be boosting the older index values by something like 15-20 per cent?

They are already doing well against the more recent set anyway.

Jorge settled into the bottom third of the table, could quite honestly say that I was expecting an outcome closer to 40 or 45 but it is what it is.