By Paul Homewood
You will of course remember the claims last week that Eowyn had set a new wind speed record in Ireland.
Leaving aside the fact that Kilkeel in N Ireland has the official record of 124 mph in 1974, I wondered just how far back Met Eireann’s records went for Mace Head.
So I asked them, and have just received this reply:
Thank you for your email.
The AWS at Mace Head was installed in 2003 and has been measuring wind at that location since 2003.
You can get all past hourly, daily and monthly datasets for Mace Head on the Met Éireann historical data webpage here: https://www.met.ie/climate/available-data/historical-data
Even by our own Met Office’s practices, this takes the biscuit.
How can they declare a record at a site that has only been in use for 22 years? No reputable organisation would do this. It has no more legitimacy than the Met Office declaring record winds on The Needles, which began recording wind speeds in 1996.
Mace Head, which has been measuring temperatures for 50 years, is in one of the most exposed locations on the west coast of Ireland. So much so that Ireland’s Weather Channel predicted it would set a record the day before the storm.
It will always be top of the list, or close to it, when gales hit that part of the coast.
So Met Eireann have no idea whether winds higher than 114 mph have hit Mace Head before 2003 – say in 1945 or 1961, when the previous record of 113 mph was set.
To declare a record with such a short set of data devalues the process. All they can legitimately claim is that it was the strongest gust since 2003.
