“We do not believe any group of men adequate enough or wise enough to operate without scrutiny or without criticism. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it, that the only way to detect it is to be free to inquire. We know that in secrecy error undetected will flourish and subvert”. – J Robert Oppenheimer.

That’s a bit rich coming from a nuclear spook/agent who deceived the whole world

But still, it holds good in all circumstances, he should know

“Two storms in a weekend” have inevitably sent the media into a frenzy. They want you to think it has hardly ever happened before.

This is what happens when you give storms silly names; it was precisely why the Met Office started it in 2015.

In the past, people accepted that wet and windy weather would often last for a few days. They viewed it as all part of one event, not two.

Boelo appears to have had more powerful and widespread winds than Austen. As usual the Met Office publicise all their usual highly exposed sites:

Machrihanish lies on the tip of the Mull of Kintyre, while Capel Curig, high up in Snowdonia regularly features in these lists. Tiree and Port Ellen are in the Inner Hebrides and Isle of Islay respectively.

Brizlee Wood sits on a 250m hill in Northumberland, so exposed that the RAF have a radar station there. South Uist is, of course, another island in the Outer Hebrides.

Brizlee Wood

The media has used headlines such as “84 mph winds batter UK”. The claim is an outright lie.

None of the above stations are remotely representative of the country at large. Away from the islands and high hills, wind speeds were much lower.

One of the worst affected regions was SW Scotland. Here at Eskdalemuir winds peaked at 64 mph:

Here in Sheffield we had winds of 53 mph. A couple of years ago, the Met Office sent me the file of daily wind speeds at Bingley, West Yorkshire, where winds gusted to 58 mph yesterday ( 50 kts):

The data from the Met Office for Bingley is in knots – as the chart below shows, 50 kts at Bingley is not in the least unusual. In the 1980s and 90s, storms with 60 kts and more occurred most years:

Bingley might not be representative of the country as a whole, as far as Boelo is concerned; but the trends are telling and highly relevant.

As for rainfall, in England & Wales as a whole, 16.71mm fell on Thursday during Austen and 18.81mm yesterday:

KNMI data only runs to 2022, but 18mm of rain in a day is again nothing unusual:

https://climexp.knmi.nl/getindices.cgi