Monday 21 October 2024

Ashley breezes past

The Met Bureaus of Ireland, UK and Nederland have had their corporate arm-wrestle and come up with their shared Storm Names list for the 2024-2025 season. Here they be: Ashley, Bert, Conall, Darragh, Éowyn, Floris, Gerben, Hugo, Izzy, James, Kayleigh, Lewis, Mavis, Naoise, Otje, Poppy, Rafi, Sayuri, Tilly, Vivienne, Wren. The names owned by Met Éireann wearing their green jersey. Vivienne of course named for Vivienne the Pirate Queen of the Nine Cattle Rustlers. We've been here before 2015 - 2018 - 2019 - 2021 - 2022 - 2023; so maybe we're running out of Trad Irish Names that only have a few silent consonants and fadas.  Storm season starts on 1st September each year but some years are slower off the mark than others. Storm Atiyah, for example didn't whistle through until the second Sunday in December 2019 fully 50 days later than Ashley.

Storms worth naming held off until this last weekend when Ashley was taken out of Pandora's Box and started whipping up waves in the Atlantic. Saturday lunchtime, I pinned the location of Ashley's Eye and asked for the Nullschool Wind App to predict its position 16 hrs ahead. 

Ashley's eye was predicted to be travelling at ~75 km/hr (the circulating wind going faster) in a NE direction and brushing her skirts against the West coast of Ireland. Ashley was accorded an orange wind-warning for 4 (later upped to 7) Wild Atlantic Weather counties from Noon Sunday and yellow for the rest of the island. We therefore made our storm preparations: filling some 5lt water containers and putting candles in candle-sticks. We needed to do this anyway because the ESB is giving us our second scheduled outage in a month tomorrow 09:30 - 14:30, Tuesday 22 Oct 24.

Saturday night and Sunday morning the forecast yellow rain came through but by the time I got up to count the sheep [N = 15, all present and correct!] before breakfast, it was barely spitting and the wind hadn't really got up.

By tea-time Sunday we had endured a few gusts but nothing really sustained and the wind-speed didn't seem to be in resonance with any local trees enough to whip off branches. So that was it. The tabloids tried to talk it up with emotive language (wreaks chaos, airport mayhem, horror map) and Rosslare ferries were cancelled, but Ashley herself had less bluster.



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