Not Gone With The Wind (part 2)
Now that the cat is out of the bag on UK storm force winds being less frequent since 1940 I take another look under the bonnet before it gets blown off…
In part 1 of this series we learned that the incidence of storm force zonal and meridional winds across UK & Irish inshore waters has steadily declined since 1850, with mean wind speed dipping to a series low during the 1970s. There are signs that mean wind speed as well as incidence of storm force winds is picking up again and we may expect alarmists to jump on this.
With the political angle out of the way I thought it would be a nice idea to have a look at the data in more detail to see what we can see as beings of a curious nature. Arguably the next best step is to look at the relationship between monthly zonal and meridional maximum mean speeds for the period January 1850 – October 2023. This came out of the oven like a flaccid soufflé with a Pearson correlation of r = 0.245 (p<0.001), and looking like this: