People work to clear fallen trees from a road during Storm Eowyn, in Feighcullen, Ireland, on Jan. 24.Clodagh Kilcoyne/Reuters
Millions of people in Ireland and northern parts of the U.K. heeded the advice of authorities to stay at home Friday in the face of hurricane-force winds that disabled power networks and brought widespread travel disruptions.
Forecasters had issued a rare “red” weather warning, meaning danger to life, across the whole island of Ireland and central and southwest Scotland.
Ireland bore the brunt of the storm first, as it was hit with wind gusts of 183 kilometres an hour, the strongest since the Second World War, as a winter storm spiralled in from the Atlantic before hitting Scotland.
A man died after a tree fell on his car in County Donegal in the northwest of Ireland, local police said.
The storm was moving fast and is expected to have cleared Scotland’s shores by late Friday.
City centres, such as Dublin in Ireland, Belfast in Northern Ireland and Glasgow in Scotland were eerily quiet, much like the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, as shops stayed closed and people heeded the advice to not venture out. For those that did leave home and were caught in one of the wind gusts, it was a struggle to stay upright.
“I want to thank members of the public for largely following Police Scotland’s advice not to travel,” said Scotland’s first minister, John Swinney.
More than a million homes, farms and businesses in the island of Ireland and Northern Ireland were without power as record-breaking wind speeds swept across the island. A further 100,000 customers in Scotland were also reported to have lost power.
Schools were closed and trains, ferries and more than 1,000 flights were cancelled in the Republic of Ireland and the U.K., even as far south as London Heathrow, as the system, named Storm Eowyn (pronounced Ay-oh-win) by weather authorities, roared in.
The disruption is set to last through Saturday. ScotRail, for example, said the storm caused significant damage to infrastructure and that a full assessment of the network will need to be done, which will include the removal of debris.
Ireland’s weather office, Met Eireann, said the 183 km/h gusts early Friday were recorded at Mace Head on the west coast, beating a record of 182 km/h set in 1945. Wind speeds in Scotland were slightly lower through the day, though still historically high.
Part of the storm’s energy originated with the system that brought historic snowfall along the Gulf Coast of the U.S., said Jason Nicholls, lead international forecaster at the private weather company AccuWeather.
Eowyn became a bomb cyclone, which happens when a storm’s pressure drops 24 millibars in 24 hours, as it brought whipping winds and heavy rain to parts of Ireland and the U.K. Winds blowing over the ocean encounter less friction than they do travelling over other terrain, like hilly land, allowing them to reach intense speeds.
The storm was so powerful that meteorologists say a sting jet developed, meaning Eowyn tapped into exceptionally strong winds higher up in the atmosphere. A sting jet is a narrow area of winds moving 161 km/h or faster that is drawn down to the Earth’s surface from the mid-troposphere and lasts for a few hours.
It’s not immediately clear whether the powerful 183 km/h wind gust that hit Ireland is linked to the sting jet.
“It’s hard to know until people go back and look through the data, but it really looks like something that a sting jet would produce,” Mr. Nicholls .
Scientists say pinpointing the exact influence of climate change on a storm is challenging, but all storms are happening in an atmosphere that is warming abnormally fast due to human-released pollutants like carbon dioxide and methane.
“As the climate gets warmer, we can expect these storms to become even more intense, with greater damages,” said Hayley Fowler, a professor of climate change impacts at Newcastle University.