Wind, Even Faster Wind and Sleet

The weather here has been very exciting. Well, at least most of the time. It did very nearly end in terrible catastrophe, but my partner avoided that.  Sadly not everyone else living here has avoided weather-induced misfortune.

I live in the Scottish Highlands, as I may have mentioned before.  In the Cairngorms (mountains not many miles south of us) the weather station reported winds of 165 mph. That's the same wind-speeds as you get in a CATEGORY 5 HURRICANE, just not quite as consistent (although the wind was pretty speedy between gusts, too).  That weather station is, I think, between our apartment and the where my partner works. It was wonderfully (well, "wonderfully" from the perspective of this weather-geek) windy here. We started off with six inches of snow this morning, but high winds and sleet took care of that. I got blown about a bit because I decided to go sort out my tax and go to the council offices on the bus. Yes, the busses are still running, this is winter, not the Apocalypse. I'm quite glad I wasn't doing conservation work today, it might have been a bit wet at the nature reserve... Well, it's always wet at the nature reserve but it might have been rather more wet. I will have to investigate any flooding and take pictures.

It may have been on the news where you are. It's been nicknamed (and I am not too keen on the profanity) "Hurricane Bawbag" and is trending like crazy on Twitter. Here is an ::article:: to photographs on the BBC and I really recommend looking at this ::satellite image::. It shows how we were really at the centre of it all and just how vast this system is! Here's a Guardian=::article:: on it. Ardrossan Windfarm has suffered severe damage - one of the turbines appears to have been destroyed and caught fire! Thankfully we haven't had a proper power-cut here, but we have had several brownouts during the day - the lights have flickered ominously.

The weather did do one not-so-good thing as far as our household is concerned today. The other half was driving home and suddenly a truck got blown into his path. My other half's dad was a fighter pilot and I think the other half inherited the reflexes, because he thankfully dodged that catastrophe. Whoever was driving that lorry was lucky not to have been tipped right over. High-sided vehicles are not suitable for high-winds - they have too high a surface area, and when they have motion and lack grip anyway, because the road is wet, then it is a recipe for disaster. That driver could have been killed. I'm quite glad nobody got hurt (especially my partner), and hope that people drive safely and have safe journeys. I saw pictures of overturned lorries on the A83 on the BBC website, and I do hope the drivers of those lorries survived with as few injuries as can be possible from such an incident. I also hope my partner has a safe commute tomorrow.

My partner and I decided to stay indoors this evening and watch Twister. I'm considering getting one of those home weather stations, and hooking that up to the laptop. The weather here is considerably more interesting than it was where I used to live. It rains in varying degrees of closeness to horizontal, for a start. I would love to have some wind-speeds from out apartment, and to see the changing pressure readings. I also wish I had found my camera before it was dark - it would have been nice to photograph and video all this.

The winds are slowing, but there's a blizzard apparently scheduled. I hope the weather remains interesting, and that people remain safe, and that things get better for anyone adversely affected. Apparently the tail of Hurricane Katia will hit us as a winter storm on Monday, which should also be interesting, and hopefully less destructive. The sheer power of nature awes me, we live on a fascinating, exciting, ever-changing planet where some of the best bits happen between its surface and space. We are only tiny, tiny beings in the face of things like the weather.