Hurricane season 2017 (Harvey, Irma, Jose, Maria, Ophelia)

From the looks of it, Ophelia has a decent (but not guaranteed) chance of making landfall as a Hurricane on the south-western shore of Ireland.

While hurricane remnants do hit Europe with some regularity, I believe there's only been a handful of actual Hurricanes that have done so in recorded history.

Um, the forecast indicates that by that point Ophelia will have merged with a cold front and thus won't be a hurricane anymore. Storms with frontal structures are not hurricanes, even if some (such as Lothar in 1999 or Kyrill in 2007) can have hurricane strength winds. Not that it's easy to compare as European storms usually don't get average wind speeds taken as opposed to gusts.

Well hurricane-force winds anyways according to the NOAA forcast.

Oh, that's annoying, there's a 1/20 chance of there still being hurricane force winds when it passes me.

Scotland will probably avoid hurricane-force winds, but it's probably going to get hit by tropical storm level winds, so stay safe.

Britain and Ireland are among the windiest places in the world. We actually have some of the highest hits of tornadoes in the world, but most of the very powerful tornados stay in our territorial waters or graze the coastal areas rather than coming far inland. That said, we get a lot of low-medium strength tornadoes coming inland every year. As a result, we're definitely the windiest land location in the whole of Europe, but the third windiest location within the European boundaries when continental shelf (territorial waters) are accounted for — only the North Sea and Baltic Sea are windier.

Hurricanes don't really reach us, however. Technical definitions mean that what hits us, even if it has hurricane strength winds, is almost never (meteorologically-speaking) a hurricane. This can cause confusion, as Michael Fish will be forever immortalised as knowing.

What can hit us is an extratropical cyclone (which in tropical regions would indeed be called a hurricane). Our most famous one occurred in 1987 and the main reason it's famous is because the top television meteorologist of the day (Michael Fish), said during his segment that he had received a phone call from a woman worried that a hurricane was coming. He said, not to worry - it's not a hurricane; he did, however, say to batten down the hatches because the winds would be bad.

Of course, then the 'hurricane' hit and Fish has never lived it down. As the Met Office keeps pointing out, it wasn't a hurricane, it was an extratropical cyclone. Fish was a proper meteorologist, not a weatherman, so the technical differences matter to him. To Joe Public, however, it was - and remains - a hurricane.

Tornadoes are the UK's big, regular thing, however. We have tornado hotspots, and a tornado alley, and these are getting more common and more powerful at the moment.

For now, the Met Office is warning Wales, Northern Ireland, Western Scotland and western parts of England (Cornwall, Devon and Cumbria) to be on the alert for what it keeps calling 'ex-Ophelia'. It's officially being referred to as a storm for our purposes.

Ah, yes, I've just checked and there's a yellow warning for Tuesday.

I'm rather glad that's not a day where I need to get the train...

Is Czechia going to catch anything from that? Because I'm going to be there in about 36 hours (after a brief stop in Germany) for a two-week stay.

edited 14th Oct '17 8:13:12 PM by MarqFJA

Barring an unprecedented meteorological phenomenon that would have a storm with a northward bent abruptly curve south-east to plunge into one of the most landlocked countries in Europe, no.

An extratropical storm isn't a hurricane even if it happens in the tropics. The key difference is that extratropical storms are powered by frontal systems that separate air of different density ("baroclinic") while tropical storms are powered by tall convection. This results in tropical storms being small structures (and thus difficult to simulate in climate models) with a circular shape and extratropical storms much larger and less windy structures with a comma like shape.

For a proper tropical storm to hit the UK or Ireland it would have to keep the tall convection and lack of frontal structures until there. Normally the sea surface temperatures aren't high enough and the tropopause temperatures^note Tropical storms are heat engines, and according to the Carnot efficiency rule their efficiency increases the colder their "outlet" - the tropopause - is not low enough^note You may have noticed that Ophelia and Lee this year and Vince in 2005 developed with unusually cold air aloft to sustain tall convection. If memory serves Hurricane Debbie in 1961 came closest and it's still controversial if it was a hurricane when it hit Ireland.

With climate change, water temperatures warm and - depending on model - tropopause temperatures cool especially away from the equator. Thus true tropical systems and "hybrid" systems will become more common.

Yes, in a nutshell. When I was studying meteorology (years ago), Debbie was called 'a probable extratropical cyclone' but was often used as a good example for why it's necessary to understand structures (the lack of which being why no-one's certain what it was when it hit).

I live on the Welsh coast, so I'm within the alert zone for ex-Ophelia's (remnant) storm-force winds, but currently the Met Office estimates are 55-65 mph with some gusts of up to 80mph. That's not an unusual storm strength for Wales; we do get worse. So, since I'm not expecting anything exciting from Ophelia's ghost (where I live anyway), I thought I'd comment on the pre-storm signs we've been getting this morning as they are a bit unusual (for the wind direction) and I used to work in conservation, so I tend to observe animal and atmospheric activities out of habit.

The highest winds aren't expected until this afternoon/evening, but it's been a very atmospheric, moody morning, starting with the dawn chorus which... didn't chorus properly, so the birds have been very spooked for hours.

There was what I thought was a thick fog before sunrise which I didn't particularly take note of (it's autumn, and I'm on the coast, fog is common). However, cars this morning look like they've had a desert dumped on them during the night, and that usually happens from more easterly winds (winds are currently south-west to south-south-west).

The morning has been filled with a strange yellow atmospheric light, like smog or those pictures that get televised of Beijing when sand from the desert is heavy in the atmosphere. All the cars have been using headlights to get around. This does happen to us, but again, the winds tend to be more easterly than this.

We had some 40 mph gusts for half an hour between 10:30-11:00; the gulls went absolutely bonkers, and birds on higher ground started to engage in evening flocking behaviour. Between 11:00-12:00, everything went calm again, leaving us with the strangest and ugliest red-orange sun that I've seen for a long time (again, usually associated with more easterly, sand-laden storms).

Anyway, it's 13:00, the atmosphere's suddenly (visually) cleared, it's sunny and starting to gust again, and asthma is kicking me in the teeth (my lungs believe the atmosphere isn't as clear as my eyes do).

edited 16th Oct '17 5:09:07 AM by Wyldchyld

Yeah, seeing the red sun and orange-brown filter was weird. Someone I follow on Twitter compared it to a Dark World.

One thing I kept thinking of was The Last Man, where Sheppard finds himself thousands of years in the future and the water planet they're based on has dried to a desert because the sun has entered a red giant phase. The episode's shot with red, orange and brown filters and lighting.

Edit:

Met Office has confirmed that particles from the Sahara and Portuguese forest fires have been picked up by the most southerly tail of Ophelia, which is what's turned the British sky sepia. That would explain why I've been feeling all day like I'm tasting ash as well as sand.

There have been a couple of deaths reported in southern Ireland from the storm (two confirmed), and Cork City's stadium has lost its roof.

edited 16th Oct '17 9:06:20 AM by Wyldchyld

Seems like typical European storm fatalities - people who for some reason I don't understand don't realize that being outside during a storm is dangerous. We are not looking at an Irish Maria or Irish "Worst Case Irma", here.

edited 16th Oct '17 10:46:34 AM by SeptimusHeap

However, local news here (Switzerland) claim that winds from Ophelia have kicked up massive forest fires in Spain and Portugal to the point that Portugal has asked for international help. 27 fatalities so far.

This hurricane season...

Europeans just tend to underestimate the danger of storms because they rarely get the really fast ones and when they hit the death toll stays pretty low because the houses are built strong enough to withstand the worst. Most people who in Europe die because of storms die in their car (when trees are falling on the street) or wandering around outside for some stupid reason.

edited 16th Oct '17 12:06:59 PM by Swanpride

Reminds me of that saying 'Only mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the noon-day sun', popularised in its modern form by Noel Coward but predating him in sentiment (Rudyard Kipling, Kim).

36 so far, in fact.

I can't believe there have been 36 people killed by forest fires in a day in the middle of October. Seems like mother nature is trying to dole out punishment for Portugal since it hasn't been affected by any major crisis in the last years.

Somewhat relevant to this thread as a direct hit on Tampa by Irma was possible this year, the worst case scenario for a Category 5 hurricane landfall close to Tampa foresees over 2000 fatalities, 2 million injuries and 250 billion dollars damage.

Tropical Storm Philippe has just formed over Cuba.

And has become extratropical again east of Florida. First tropical storm in a few months not to become a hurricane.

Incidentally, it‘s the five year anniversary of Sandy today. The largest storm in the recorded history of the Atlantic.

So, hurricane season is officially over now. 10 consecutive hurricanes, 6 of them major, 2 of the Cat 5.

It is already classified as the costliest in recent times, and one of the more destructive ones (also accounting for the fact that the last storm - Rina - spawned another system in the Mediterranean, a tropical-storm-in-all-but-name which caused damage and fatalities in Greece) too.

I am living on one of the Caribbean Islands affected by Hurricane Irma. It’s pretty much been a :Tearjerker: for many people where I live