Storm Debi : Mon 13th Nov 2023

Last report on Debi. Was up at the soccer club tonight, a good few big branches down, damage to some new metal fencing after a goal was thrown against it, and a good indicator of the wind direction was all the goals were blown towards the eastern corner of the grass pitches.

It also seems to have scared the crap out of my 7 year old as the sound of the wind in the trees had her clinging on to me.

I think we were advised not to travel though unless it was absolutely necessary?

They might have saved some lives too. I got some news for you. The world doesn't revole around you.

The conditions from the forecast might have warranted a red the night before. They can't predict how the storm behaved over night.

If they didn't issue a red warning and the storm turned out to be a red warning event you would be moaning as well.

Its not as if they evacuated Dublin. It's shocking that people had to adjust a little to mind their own children.

I can't really complain about Met Eireann's Red warning. Whilst some counties got lucky (and the storm was downgraded as an Orange, in some counties, hours after being declared a red, but it was in the a.m morning time, so most folks probably didn't see it) you'd still have to warrant the dangers it represented. 60, 000 to 70, 000 houses were left without power. It seemed to hit as hard as Darwin in some counties.

You definitely had to make sure people knew this was not going to be any normal weather warning. I mean, years back, Met Eireann gave serious warning due to a serious storm. Some guy went out in the storm, with a chainsaw, to cut fallen trees.

It didn't end well for him.

So they have to underline the dangers. Can't really be having repeats of that.

Are Met Eireann weather stations in the right locations ( or in enough locations). Highest Met Eireann gust of 115kph recorded in Athenry however unofficial station in the Marine Institute only 15km away was at 142kph. As we know the fields lie pretty low around the Athenry area(sic). Surely Met Eireann could get feeds from these more reputable sources to build a broader picture a extrems are often pretty local.

It's a "non-event", as most people heeded the warnings. They have to take into account impacts as well - rush hour in the east, during school term.

I have seen the Marine Institute station described as a "personal weather station at the Marine Institute" - whatever that means. It sounds like a pet project with the Marine Institute name used to give it legitimacy. Is this weather station inspected, audited, validated etc. by ME. If it isn't then they should not use its data to try to justify a red warning. Scientists in other fields do not or should not rely on third parties in his manner.

ME do need more stations, not a huge number, perhaps 10 more for the country? They also need to keep all of the ones they currently have for continuity of data purposes. There need to be stringent planning and other controls protecting the locations as much as possible. That's if we're serous about weather and climate.

The data is either official or it is not and as I said, this station is being described as a "personal weather station". Also calibration of instruments isn't enough. I certainly wouldn't outsource scientific work to a third party on the basis of them calibrating their instruments. At a minimum I'd be regularly inspecting and auditing them myself and/or relying on an authority such as INAB to do so.

Consider a different scenario where ME issues a red wind warning and a ME station shows red level gusts with a MI station showing green. A journalist uses this to question ME on why a red warning was issued. Do you think that ME are going to accept that they may have gotten it wrong based on unofficial measurements? They will not.

Weather station auditing sounds like a grand civil service job for someone. Maybe something for a HEO, EO and a couple of COs to do on a weekly basis. I might apply for it myself 😅

More data is better if you can stand over the veracity - that's a big if. Perhaps you are right that the reason the MI station is not an official one is because of the proximity to the official Athenry station. Regardless of the reason for it being an unofficial station or how easy it is to operate an anemometer, if ME is going to use scientific data to justify official red warnings, then it needs to be official data. It's that black and white.

I wouldn't have much of an issue with ME justifying a red warning by making more general, vague statements about how the Athenry station may not be representative of weather conditions elsewhere in Galway due to station location. They'll try to avoid saying that though as it would see them rightly criticised for not having a representative station. If they then deflect by introducing unofficial data from third parties into their justification, using the fact that they are legitimate state agencies to legitimise the data, that puts ME firmly into spin territory.

The buoy data is different, if ME has deemed that this data is official and that the Marine Institute has the necessary expertise, competence and equipment to do this work.

I've worked for state agencies in scientific roles and have seen plenty of spin, fudging and politicking happen along with many issues with outsourcing, data quality, consistency, management and reporting. I would hope that ME is the most rigorous of the state agencies but that might be naive. Am still shocked that they allow RTE to repeat the previous day's forecast every morning on TV with references to today and tonight etc. That would indicate that ME isn't as on top of of its remit or as protective of its reputation as it should be.

Where well over due a decent Arctic blast fingers and toes crossed

Very interested to read about the gusts recorded at the marine institute Oranmore. I live in the town and it was the worst wind I've ever experienced, I said it earlier in the thread but there was 20 minutes or so that it was particularly ferocious and peeking out the window I saw debris and rubbish hurtling past at a crazy speed. It was very very localised though, as you can see from the reports of damage being in about a 20km zone along Galway Bay.

Still out tonight @snowstreams Has to chuck all the food in the freezer. Be same for every household now without power at this stage. No heat. Dark at 5pm. No light. Not sure if many elderly in the locality effected. I thinking of them, without heat and light. ☹️

Something happened in Maree/Oranmore. In Spiddal the sea didn't overtop & few trees were damaged. In Maree/Oranmore walls were blown down, a huge tree blown over & seaweed spread 20 feet up into gardens.

Anyway, on this occasion the actual speeds in the end are sort of irrelevant to the red warning. In the past 2 years, we've adopted more of a hybrid criteria/impact based system rather than 100% criteria. The red was clearly a case of being cautious in case a stingjet were to develop. Stingjets are notoriously challenging in predicting. In fact, a stingjet did likely happen over Galway from Debi if you paid attention to a hook-like feature over Galway Bay on the satellite imagery. The last stingjet that made landfall over Ireland that I recall before Debi was from Eleanor in January 2018. Belmullet had only a maximum gust of 89 km/h from this storm but Knock Airport had as much as 156 km/h yet both are in the same county. The nearby Newport had a gust of 139 km/h. There was no red warning for Eleanor at the time and was another storm Galway got severe floods from.

However, the red in the east of the country such as Dublin was likely down to timing of the strongest gusts than any actual numbers - occurring during rush hour after all. Debi passed further to the north and peaked earlier than that so the impacts weren't as severely felt here as they could have been. There was never any sign of red warranted winds in this part of the country if you were to go purely by the numbers.

We use the official stations ONLY as they are calibrated to a universal standard and are consistently quality checked though there are some questionable official stations as has long been debated on this forum before. No doubt there are some good placed and calibrated PWS out in this world but they're very much the minority. They cannot be compared. There would be so much inconsistency and problems if we were to start using PWS as a means of documenting an event.

I woke at 4:30 in Athenry from the roar & my 2 boys woke up shortly after that too. At the time I remember people in Clare were getting the worst of it from reading here on boards. But I could see what I thought was a squall line coming on the rainfall radar. It turned into more of a hook just around the oranmore area.

The wind really went wild shortly before the rain arrived, so I take it the sting jet was just in front of the rain band. We lost power & then we all moved downstairs to be safe. I forgot to screenshot it but I got a screenshot of it a while later when the sting was probably near Athlone.

I was in Castlebar when storm eleanor happened & Debi reminded me of it with how sudden the wind speeds picked up.

Here are a few photos from Renville where the marine institute is located. You can see that the water came a few metres higher than the car park level. That car park doesnt flood as often as Salthill so it makes this sea level rise more impressive. Plenty of old trees are down near the childrens playground in the park too. They would have been over 100 years old but maybe age was weakening them too.

Edit: The black stuff is seaweed that was left several metres above the highest sea level mark that I’ve seen before.

this field is still flooded with sea water too. Not sure if grass will be able to regrow there but with plenty of fresh Irish rain I’m sure it will recover!

Brilliant, I have the name Storm K in my diary too. That storm was phenomenal and it was named Storm K by Met eireann . The satellite picture of the storm was on the front page of the Irish Independent with the caption Storm K. I think they named it because of how exceptional and widespread it was. I have it as Storm K in the 'weather memories ' thread a while back so I'm glad someone else has the name recorded.

Oh dear, I'm afraid that's true. It was just a basic record of the actual weather from the previous day . I have them from 1987 along with newspaper reports of all kinds of weather extremes. Most of them are somewhere in my parents attic but I still have access in my own home from 2008. That's the cat out of the bag!

That's the one alright.

Weather like that wouldnt be an issue for an RNLI ALB.