The Great Storm of 15–16 October 1987

Sting jets in severe northern European wind storms

“…The most detailed study has been of the Great Storm, which passed over the UK on 15/16 October 1987 (Browning, 2004;Clark et al, 2005). In this storm, peak gusts of over 50ms -1 (91kn) were recorded, resulting in hundreds of millions of pounds worth of damage and felling millions of trees (Burt and Mansfield, 1988). Parton (2007) identified mesoscale events with damaging winds over a sevenyear period using Mesosphere-StratosphereTroposphere (MST) radar data, and classified some of these as potential sting jet cases.…”

The great storm and the fall of the first Tay Rail Bridge

“…Not only had the Tay Bridge fallen and the city of Dundee suffered damage, but also the tower at Kilchurn Castle on Loch Awe fell that night, telegraph wires were brought down throughout the country and many hundreds of mature trees had been blown down at Dunecht, Aberdeenshire, between 2100 and 2200 h, whilst in Glen Lyon, just north of Dundee, forests of old (well-rooted) Scotch firs were blown down (Buchan 1880;Crawford 2002). Although no data are available, it is possible that the damage from the Tay Bridge storm may have been on a par with that of the October 1987 storm, which brought down an estimated 15 million trees and caused significant structural damage in southern England (Burt and Mansfield 1988).…”

Rapid intercontinental air pollution transport associated with a meteorological bomb

“…Surface wind gusts above 50 m s −1 have been reported over land. Examples of destructive bombs over Europe are the great storm of October 1987 over southern England (Burt and Mansfield, 1988) and the Christmas storms of 1999, that claimed 130 lives and caused 13 billion Euros worth of total economic losses in central Europe (Ulbrich et al, 2001). The danger of bombs also comes from their explosive development and their rapid motion, both of which are often not well predicted by weather forecast models (Sanders et al, 2000).…”