Jocelyn sweeps past

Just about 48 hours after Storm Isha gave Donegal a drubbing and scattered Dublin-bound planes all over NW Europe, Storm Jocelyn followed in her footsteps.

We weathered Isha well enough, parking The Grape almost in the living room to escape any falling deadwood. In the morning, I was up at first light to check that we could reach the county road down our lane. We had places to go, things to do in the forenoon. If I didn't need to cut our way out then I could have breakfast instead.

What you see in the foreground is most of the larger wood-rain; none of which fell dagger-down in The Grape's usual parkplatz. But I'd do the same again.

The most significant Isha damage was the loss of half of a dead Scot's Pinus sylvestris down at the bottom corner of the haggard. 

The branch/trunk broke off 6ft =  1.8m above the ground - presumably after getting into a thrashing resonance with the wind at some time in the night. It's quite safe for the moment but is applying extra weight to the leaning ash Fraxinus excelsior from which Gdau.II's swing-buoy is suspended. With Jocelyn incommmming, some or all of this teeter-totter might fall. Then we'll have to find somewhere else to put the more daddo, higher daddo, hiiiigher kidder into low-earth orbit.

As noted last year Storm Jocelyn is named after Jocelyn "No-Bell" Bell Burnell, discoverer of pulsars, long term supporter of Open University and active promoter of more young women in science.

And I quote Met Éireann meteorologist Aoife Kealy has urged people to be mindful that Storm Jocelyn may exasperate damage to structures that have already been damaged by Storm Isha. Exasperate?? My damage would be quite pissed off as well I can tell you.

We escaped the indignity of electric failure with Isha, although at peak on Monday 22 Jan 24 225,000 ESB customers were in darkness. That count was down to 50,000 by noon the following day; just as Jocelyn started to ramp up the windspeed. But this second storm - perhaps frightened by the weather forecasting Donegal postman - edged Northwards and barely brushed the country. At 0700 hours 24 Jan 24, only 29K homes were without power: 16,000 residual from Isha and an additional 13,000 from storm J. By that metric Jocelyn was but 6% as fighty as Isha. Not complaining, mind! As the Storm's namesake said last September "I am delighted to feature in this distinguished list celebrating science and hope that if a potential “Storm Jocelyn” happens, it may be a useful stirring-up rather than a destructive event!".

One bad outcome of this might be to increase skepticism about MetEireann warnings: leading to people being out and about at the wrong time because them weather people always talk it big. That would be foolish because MetEireann is much better at predicting the weather than all the berry-counting postmen in the country.