Ireland was hit with wind gusts of 183 km/h, the strongest on record, as a winter storm battered the country and northern parts of the U.K. on Friday, leaving hundreds of thousands of people without power.
Schools were closed, trains halted and hundreds of flights cancelled in the Republic of Ireland, neighbouring Northern Ireland and Scotland as the system, named Storn Éowyn by weather authorities, roared in.
Forecasters issued a rare “red” weather warning, meaning danger to life, for Friday across the whole island of Ireland and central and southwest Scotland.
“Please just stay at home if you can,” Northern Ireland First Minister Michelle O’Neill said on BBC Radio Ulster. “We’re in the eye of the storm now. We are in the period of the red alert.”
The Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh shut its doors and Scottish First Minister John Swinney said: “We have to be clear. People should not travel.”
More than 700,000 homes and businesses in Ireland and almost 100,000 in Northern Ireland were without power due to “unprecedented, widespread and extensive” damage to electricity infrastructure, the Irish Electricity Supply Board said.
Ireland’s weather office, Met Eireann, said the new wind record was recorded at Mace Head on the west coast, eclipsing the previous mark of 182 km/h set in 1945.
The storm is being propelled by the jet stream and is being fed by energy in upper levels of the atmosphere. A rapid drop in air pressure is expected and could make Éowyn a bomb cyclone, which happens when a storm’s pressure drops 24 millibars in 24 hours.
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.
