A sting in the tale: lessons from The Great Storm of 1987
What were you doing exactly thirty years ago? Perhaps you don’t remember?
Me? Well, on the evening of October 15, 1987, I was just going off to bed for what would be a very turbulent night.
I was one of 700 boys who were pupils at The Royal Hospital School, a naval boarding school in a very remote part of East Anglia, on the Suffolk/Essex border. We were split between eleven boarding houses spread across the 200 acre site, and — as chance would have — my boarding house was on the southwestern edge.
Unlike Hogwarts, we didn’t have moving staircases and portraits that moved about, but we did have dormitories, and — as head prefect of the house — I was in the far southwestern corner.
Which I guess made me first in the firing line for any winds sweeping in across the country heading northeast.
The boarding house dated from 1933, and — as far as anyone was concerned — hadn’t really been updated much since. The floorboards were treacly from years of varnish. Huge sash windows sat above formidable cast iron radiators, thick from many years of overpainting. These windows rattled enough in any stiff breeze, but that night, right above my head, the window was banging away to such an extent that, around 3am, I gave up trying to sleep. Others may have been awake, but they weren’t allowed to wander around after lights out. As head prefect though, I could pretty much do what I wanted.
Something was up weatherwise; I decided to get out of bed to investigate.
Of course, what was happening was the Great Storm of 1987, a violent, extra-tropical cyclone, which swept across the UK bringing 1 in 200 year winds.
The storm is often referred to as a hurricane, but it wasn’t: the dynamics of cyclones at northern latitude are completely different — there is no ‘eye’ for instance — and sea surface temperatures are too low to drive the mechanism by which hurricanes are sustained. But The Royal Sovereign Lighthouse just off the coast of Eastbourne recorded a mean (average) wind speed of 87 mph that night, and that places it smack bang in the middle of the Saffir-Simpson definition of a category 1 hurricane.
Hurricane terminology can be used to track what happened. The storm made landfall in the vicinity of Prawle Point in South Devon (sometime around 1.30am). By 2am, a weather monitoring station near Exeter recorded a central pressure of 957mb — the lowest recorded over the UK mainland for 150 years (to put that into perspective, the recent Hurricane Irma was 929mb when it made landfall in the Florida Keys).
By 3am (roughly the time I decided to get out of bed) it was over the Somerset Levels. By the time the centre emerged over the North Sea at 5.30am just north of The Wash, 15 million trees had been felled and damage had been caused estimated by British insurers at £1.4bn.
As ex-hurricanes slow down over land, the wind field spreads out. And because all northern hemisphere cyclones spin anti-clockwise — and this cyclone was moving quickly — the strongest winds were on the eastern side, some distance from the lowest pressure, where the direction of spin combined with the forward motion of the storm.
It’s known as the ‘dirty side’ of the hurricane in the tropics for good reason — and my school was in the firing line.
The electricity was still on at 3am, and I went downstairs to the junior dayroom. Peering out of the window, I could see the tree-lined walkway up to the main school block. Backlit by nightlights, and with most of the leaves still on in early Autumn, they were bending and swaying impressively. In the morning, many of those trees would be down, and I may have been the last to see them standing — but for now they were a good indicator that we were in the middle of a good old storm.
I walked back through the building to its western side, which was receiving the full force of the increasingly alarming gusts, juddering the windows and making the side door groan. I couldn’t hear any rain. The whole thing felt illicit and exciting. In the more innocent days of the 1980s (and the fact that the school was so isolated), none of the outside doors were locked. I had to see what was happening, so I opened the front door of the boarding house and stepped outside.
Since that night, thirty years ago, I’ve become something of a weather — and hurricane — geek. It may seem ghoulish, but I love to keep tabs on the National Hurricane Centre website during hurricane season in the tropics, pouring over the technical discussions, with their use of terms such as ‘marginal SSTs’, ‘baroclinic forcing’ and ‘Dvorak numbers’ (a heuristic to allow hurricane status to be inferred from satellite imagery where direct measurements are sparse). I follow professional science-led hurricane hunters like Josh Morgerman, tweeting and sending barometer measurements from inside the eye of a hurricane as it comes ashore.
I’ve read plenty of eyewitness accounts of hurricane impacts. And in the many of the eye-witness accounts I have read, the one thing that everyone says about a hurricane is the roaring wind, like standing next to a jet engine.
That’s how I remember the experience of stepping outside that front door.
On that side of the boarding house — the western edge of the school — there were plenty of trees and shrubbery, and that night, staring into the pitch darkness of the gale, I heard a roaring noise that I can still close my eyes and allow my 17 year old self to conjure up.
I didn’t stay outside for long. Eventually I went back to bed, and fell asleep. We were woken the next morning to discover a scene of devastation. My strongest memory was of a boat, washed up off the river Stour and onto the seawall. Trees down everywhere. And the clock on the central school tower stopped at 5.15am, when the electricity must have gone out.
As we mustered for the march up to breakfast, I have another strong memory of one of the more eccentric teachers, Mr Brennan, out walking his dogs. He was wearing a crash helmet…
Ten years ago, on the twentieth anniversary, the British insurance industry commissioned a retrospective report into The Great Storm, both to look at the lessons learned and also to gauge the impacts of what might happen if the storm struck in 2007. Using a re-analysis of the data collected in the meantime, they were able to piece together a map of where the strongest winds struck.
Given that the centre of the cyclone passed well to the west of the dark areas of highest wind, there is strong evidence of ‘the dirty side’ of the cyclone in terms of the wind intensity. The lower ‘X’ on the map corresponds to Sevenoaks (which lost six of its seven oak trees) and also Toy’s Hill, which lost 97% of its trees.
But you’ll notice another small area right on the East Anglian coast. That second ‘X’ is my school. Just up the coast, at Gorlestone, a 122mph gust was recorded (the highest measured in the UK during the storm).
In 1987 , before any re-analysis had been carried out, the focus was on recovery, and an inquest into the failings of why the severity of the storm hadn’t been predicted. The morning after, harassed BBC weathermen were subjected to cross-examination on the news in scenes worthy of Paxman (as Michael Buerk said to Ian McCaskill “Well, Ian, you chaps were a fat lot of good last night! If you can’t forecast the worst storms for several centuries three hours before they happen, what are you doing?”).
But that strange outlier of winds set in motion a whole new area of research, and — in 2003 — after years of reanalysis, and improved modelling of weather systems, an entirely new feature of the storm was discovered and documented. It was something called a ‘sting jet’, known about anecdotally for years, but for the first time able to be simulated in the new computer models developed at the Met Office. Caused by an amplification effect of evaporating moisture 100 or so miles away from the centre on the southern flank of an intense cyclone, it is this effect that is thought to have brought additional devastation on that eastern shoreline. It’s the reason why my school took a hit — and lost power — shortly before the centre passed over the North Sea just after 5am.
Due to fallen trees, we were cut off completely for two days, and without power for nearly a week. The school is located in a place called the Shotley Peninsula, with tenuous utility and road connections, and by Monday, the school threw in the towel. Half-term was coming on Friday, so it was decided to send all pupils home early.
(Apart from those students — me included — who were choristers, and singing in the annual ‘Mission to Seafarers’ service at St Paul’s Cathedral later that week. It was with some chagrin to watch everyone else heading off in coaches on that Monday, but we were able to celebrate the triumphant return of power on Tuesday evening with the finest-tasting marmite toast that to this day has never been bettered.)
The Great Storm had a significant impact on the way we track and predict extreme weather. In its aftermath, huge efforts were made to focus on improving computer models, and filling the gaps of our monitoring systems to give us better coverage of where storm might emerge (in 1987, a weathership in the Bay of Biscay had recently — and cruelly — been retired through budget cuts, which left the country more than unusually blind to the sort of explosive Atlantic low that is, to this day, tricky to predict).
Satellite enabled weather monitoring and in-orbit monitoring means that it is unlikely that we will ever be caught out again as in 1987.
But The Great Storm had a more personal — and profound — impact on me. With the benefit of hindsight, thirty years hence, it came at the end of a sequence of events which shaped my worldview at what I guess was a sweetspot of teenage awakening about the wider world. Having had faith in technology eroded by the events of Challenger and Chernobyl in 1986, the storm of 1987 seemed to coincide with a general awakening to the threat posed by Climate Change. By 1992 I was working at a renewable energy publisher, covering the 1992 Earth Summit, and it seemed that momentum was building to change fundamentally the way we ran the world.
Those early days of Climate Consensus seem far away today, although a better understanding of the operation of power should have made us foresee that Climate Change represents an existential threat to huge swathes of traditionally powerful industries, politicians and even religious perspectives.
In hindsight, a retaliation by these powers to undermine scientific consensus should have been expected (and in fact anyone who wants to understand the way politics can pervert science should swot up on the activities of Trofim Lysenko under Stalin). But the truth always outs, and those of us who remain climate optimists see this as a last gasp redoubt in the face of fundamental changes we have to make in terms of clean energy, protecting the ecosystem and delivering climate justice.
Those of us in the West tend to see history in terms of progress. It’s only when you aren’t at the top of the heap that you change your framework, and see the story of humanity as a struggle.
Standing in the wreckage of his British Virgin Island paradise, Richard Branson called for a ‘Marshall Plan’ to fix the islands. To mangle a piece of Chinese wisdom, and looking back at that first Earth Summit, “the best time to take action on climate change was 25 years ago, the second best time is now”.
Ex-hurricane Ophelia is currently spinning its way towards the coast of Ireland. Due to freakishly warm oceanic heat content, it’s the strongest hurricane ever to form this far east. It too might have a sting in its tale. But thanks to the changes put in place over the last thirty years — not least the world-leading modelling that we, as Europeans, now lead the world in — we can prepare and brace for impact. But if Climate Change is delivering more energy into the global weather system — and the physics says it is — then we’ll need more than better predictions to weather this particular storm.
Actually Richard, when it comes to climate, we need a Marshall Plan for the whole planet. This new storm perhaps will allow us to look back 30 years, and rediscover some of that optimism in terms of what to do in the face of adversity: get better data, do better science — and take action.
(Update 17/10: after publishing this, Professor Keith Browning, who led the re-analysis into the Great Storm that identified the ‘sting jet’ phenomenon has published an account of this work on The Conversation. It’s well worth a read if you are interested in the science behind this.)
