From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

In yesterday’s post, this comment was left about Storm Agnes. So I wondered if I had missed something.

The Met Office’s obsession with extreme wind speeds in highly exposed and upland sites diverts attention away from what is going on down below, where we all happen to live.

It is of course human nature to blur out the past and think that everything nowadays is bigger, worse/better, wetter/drier and so on than in the past.

So I have taken a look at Milford Haven, which on the south coast of Pembrokeshire would have borne the brunt of the southerly winds from Agnes. I doubt whether anywhere else in the region would have experienced stronger winds, unless in unusually exposed locations.

Sustained wind speeds peaked at 32 mph during the storm, which puts it on the borderline between a strong breeze and a near gale on the Beaufort Scale:

Wind speeds of this level are commonplace in the UK, and certainly so on exposed coasts.

There’s no evidence either from the Met Office that rainfall was particularly high in South Wales, with the heaviest rain falling in N Ireland and Scotland: