Development & Analysis Of A UK Storm Indicator (part 6)

Today I take a look at daily wind speed data as gathered by 26 Irish weather stations since WWII (and clean it up a little)

If you want decent wind data – daily records by station and all that - then Ireland is the place and KNMI Climate Explorer is a wonderful tool you can use to extract whatever data are available in the public domain. The European Climate Assessment & Dataset (ECAD) is where the good stuff is kept, with the KNMI interface making retrieval of raw data a doddle.

If we throw a big sampling frame down…

…then KNMI reveals there are 27 weather stations dotted around Ireland that have kept daily wind speed records over the years, the most venerable being the Valentia Observatory.

The first ‘real time’ weather observation was transmitted from Valentia Island in Co. Kerry on the 8th October 1860 under the auspices of the Meteorological Committee of the British Board of Trade. The site was meteorologically important as it was situated in the path of most of the weather systems moving in from the Atlantic.

Now that sounds wonderful, except for the fact that daily wind speed record offered to the publi…