As forecast storm Eunice followed close on the heels of Dudley. For us there was no doubting that Eunice was the worst of the two storms.
I think it’s worth pointing out here that my weather station is set up to monitor the wind speeds in our garden rather than compete with professionally set up weather stations. Hence the wind speeds I record bear no comparison to wind speeds mentioned in the mainstream media. I usually make a note when wind gusts exceed 20 mph. In summer gusts around such a speed will cause damage to plants in the garden. Fortunately, through the summer months, such wind gusts don’t occur regularly but through autumn and winter they are much more common.
I hope that you can see from the figure above that for us storm Dudley lasted longer than Eunice but the top wind speeds were considerably less. Dudley managed to make it into the top twenty windiest days I’ve recorded, based on the average wind speed over the whole day. Eunice on the other hand made it into my top twenty windiest days based on individual gust speeds. The two top twenty tables are set out below.
It was just our luck that our car was booked in for a service on Friday during storm Eunice. The trip to the garage in the morning was uneventful, as the storm hadn’t arrived. Our journey in the afternoon wasn’t so uneventful. The quickest way to the garage involves a short one junction journey on the M1 motorway. As we got onto the M1 heading southbound we could see that a lorry had been blown onto its side on the northbound carriageway blocking the motorway and resulting in a long queue of traffic. We would need to rethink our return journey. On our return journey we were caught up in all the traffic diverting from the M1 motorway. The trip of 6 miles from garage to home took 46 minutes as all the motorway traffic tried to divert through Wakefield and avoid the delays on the M1.
I didn’t manage any dashcam footage of the overturned lorry and in the garden we haven’t had any damage. However, I did spot this road sign which looks as though it has suffered a little bit in the storm.
It’s continued stormy following on from the named storms with some light snow falling amongst all the rain on Saturday. Sunday has continued windy and there is yet another named storm, Franklin, due to arrive on Monday. Hope it is no worse than Dudley.
Very interesting. The little blue lines are nice. I think damage from the wind often comes with a change in direction. For example, I had a 50 mph earlier this season which caused no damage. It came from the southwest which is the normal afternoon sea breeze direction which occurs almost daily around 4 o’clock. Just a few days ago I had a 37 mph wind from the northwest which is the one I described recently that was so damaging to the pots on the ground. The 90 degree difference in direction made a tremendous difference in the amount of damage.difference. I call the northwest wind “The Tile Ripper” because it blows off the red clay tiles on that corner of the roof. Were the winds from Eunice and Dudley from the same direction?
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