THE Met Office has said that Storm Eowyn was “probably the strongest storm” to hit the UK in at least 10 years.
For parts of Scotland, perhaps the most intense in “more like 20 or 30 years”.
A gust of 100mph was recorded at Drumalbin in South Lanarkshire in Scotland on Friday.
More than a million people in the UK were without power, including some 106,000 properties in Scotland late on Friday evening, according to the Scottish Government.
Disruption was widespread. On Saturday morning, Network Rail Scotland said nearly 400 “incidents of damage” have been found including more than 120 reports of fallen trees.
Meanwhile, more than 1100 flights were cancelled on Friday, with Dublin, Edinburgh, Heathrow and Glasgow airports the worst affected.
It was certainly one hell of a storm. And that has led many to ask: did climate change play a part and can we increasingly expect more storms like Eowyn in the future?
Simon Tett, a professor at the University of Edinburgh, said that it’s “really hard to say”.
The academic previously told The National that we can expect more intense rainfall when storms arise due to climate change.
But for extratropical storms like Eowyn – which formed in the North Atlantic and intensified rapidly due to the horizontal temperature contrasts that exist in the atmosphere – the picture is more complicated.
“I don't think we have any coherent guidance from our modeling and the observational record,” Tett said.
“The problem with extreme events is that they're quite rare. And so it's quite hard to do robust statistics on that and say what's happening.”
He added: “At the moment, I don't think as a scientific community, we have consensus on what, particularly extratropical storms might do [due to climate change]”.
Professor Suzanne Gray from the University of Reading said that Eowyn was certainly a rare storm with central pressure dropping to below 940 millibars as the storm approached the west coast of Scotland.
“Pressures below 940mb are rare for the British Isles, with only five reliably recorded occasions of pressures below 940mb on the mainland British Isles in 200 years of reliable measurements up to 2007,” she said.
The academic said that stormy weather is “not unusual in the autumn and winter” over the UK.
She added: “It requires detailed research to attribute the strength of the impacts of any specific storm to climate change. To date, the observed trends in UK storminess have not provided a conclusive link with climate change.
“One reason why is it difficult to make this link is that the position and variability of UK storminess is very dependent on the position of the jet stream, which varies substantially.”
Gray went on: “However, studies have shown that winter storms may become more frequent and clustered in the future, such that several storms occur one after the other.
“The intensity of rainfall is likely to increase but it is unclear how the overall intensity will change because of competing effects. The small number of studies that have considered the 'sting jets' that can produce particularly strong localised surface winds and gusts have found an increasing likelihood that they will occur in storms.”
