Storm Xaver over Europe in December 2013: Overview of energy impacts and North Sea events

Abstract

Abstract. Storm Xaver on 5–6 December 2013 was a serious winter storm in northern Europe with important impacts on societal and energy infrastructure. The storm's low pressure centre passed eastward north of Scotland, across the North Sea and southern Scandinavia, and into the Baltic region. The trajectory resulted in strong northwest winds and a cold air outbreak southward across the North Sea. The resultant convection system was associated with powerful wind gusts and freezing precipitation that impacted the UK, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Poland, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway. The storm caused coastal flooding that was comparable with the most serious North Sea surge events of the 20th century. The primary impact for energy meteorology was a large scale electrical power loss in the northern part of the British Isles, Sweden, Poland, and parts of Germany. Petroleum production was reduced as offshore platforms were evacuated ahead of the storm. For wind energy, a number of onshore turbines were damaged by the gust field. Other societal impacts included travel and transport interruptions, building damage, forest damage, and coastal erosion. Because of the high water levels and sea state in the North Sea, the storm was important for offshore wind energy. The wind energy research tower FINO1 sustained unexpected damage during the storm, similar to previous wave strikes during Storm Britta (2006) and Storm Tilo (2007). A closer analysis is made of the tide gauge records across the North Sea to understand the progression of the storm surge and identify high amplitude, short-period features that may be linked to unusual seiches, meteotsunamis, or infragravity waves. Similar to previous storms, there is an indication that large infragravity waves during Storm Xaver may have had an impact on North Sea transport and energy infrastructure as well as coastal erosion. The review of information from different sources permits the met-ocean conditions and resultant societal/energy impacts to be related in time and space.

Storm Anatol over Europe in December 1999: impacts on societal and energy infrastructure

“…The Supplement presents a full list of literature sources for the storm, with summary tabulations of the different impacts and themes. This storm report follows on earlier reports of Storm Britta in 2006, Storm Tilo in 2007, and Storm Xaver in 2013 were also noted for their offshore energy infrastructure impacts (Kettle, 2018(Kettle, , 2019(Kettle, , 2020.…”

“…To overcome the problem of tide gauge zero level inconsistencies, Rossiter (1958) performed an ad hoc levelling procedure for a collection of North Sea tide gauge stations by comparing the measured water levels around the North Sea during low wind periods. Kettle (2020) overcame the apparent bias problem by adjusting his modelled water levels upwards by the amount of apparent bias to achieve agreement with the literature reports. For the present analysis of Storm Anatol, the opposite strategy was used, and the literature reports were adjusted downward by the mean bias calculated for each country's tide gauge collection.…”

“…ing to the long period (mostly storm surge), short period (mostly harbour seiche or meteo-tsunami), and tidal (diurnal plus semidiurnal, combined) contributions. The analysis follows similar tide gauge studies of Gönnert et al (2004) and Kettle (2018Kettle ( , 2019Kettle ( , 2020. A discrete Fourier transform was used to convert the detrended time series data into a power spectrum (Stull, 1988), similar to the example for Lerwick in Fig.…”

Climate Impact Storylines for Assessing Socio-Economic Responses to Remote Events

“…The storyline enables the assessment to move beyond standard assessments of SLR and include the influence of (remote) ice masses on Greenland and Antarctica and their potential contribution to (large) sea level rise (Le Bars et al, 2017;IPCC, 2021), which is transmitted to coastal regions by increasing the impact of storms like Xaver. The socio-economic impact consisted of direct damage and wider economic losses as a result of storm-induced inundation of critical infrastructure and power outages in surrounding areas of the Hamburg port area (Kettle, 2020). The simulation of the direct and indirect impacts of the 2013 Xaver landfall is complemented with the simulation of the counterfactual occurrence of the same storm event under a climate perturbation represented by a mean sea level that is elevated by 2.25m; a hypothetical sea level rise for 2120 assuming a high climate forcing and substantial instability of the Greenland and Antarctica ice masses.…”

Improvements to the detection and analysis of external surges in the North Sea

“…Upon closer inspection, this calculation was most likely influenced by missing wind records at some German weather stations, bringing the maximum height to 95 cm. Still, extraordinary heights were calculated at Immingham and Texel (Spencer et al, 2015;Kettle, 2020), highlighting the need for further, detailed analysis of single external events using multiple approaches to assess the occurrence and impact of the highest external surges.…”