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Old February 26th 10, 08:38 PM posted to uk.sci.weather
Will Hand Will Hand is offline
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Default Who was that lady? And a question for Mr Dixon and others.


"Alex Stephens Jr" wrote in message
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wrote in message
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On Fri, 26 Feb 2010 20:04:49 -0000, "Col"
wrote:

Alex Stephens Jr wrote:
Who was that lady who telephoned the beeb on a certain day in October
1987 to ask if there was a hurricane on the way?

Wasn't that question actually concerning a hurricane in Florida
and therefore nothing to do with the UK at all, but had simply
got hoplessly tangled up with the 'folklore' of the Oct 1987
storm and Michael Fish's now infamous broadcast?
--
Col

Bolton, Lancashire
160m asl

No, Michael Fish said there was no hurricane risk from an approaching
storm coming towards the UK.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/d...00/2533219.stm


Although, of course, he did say it would be very windy... Technically he
was correct on both counts. Without prompting from a telephone call, Shian
Lloyd (appoligies if incorrect spelling) stated the same on this evenings
ITV weather bulletin as Michael Fish did all those years ago.

I still wouldn't mind a proffesionals input into this subject - and
whether current model output in anyway takes into account the events of 22
and a bit years ago?
I detect a lot of hesitation also :-)


Alex, the Great Storm of 1987 was over 22 years ago and NWP has moved a long
way. It too IIRC was a Shapiro-Keyser system with a seclusion (warm core),
but Shapiro-Keyser had not written their paper in 1987 so the understanding
was less. What that storm did was to focus forecaster's minds on making
better use of satellite imagery to spot conceptual features. The modelling
of this storm looks to be superb capturing the west-east orientation and
warm air seclusion process typical of this kind of system. Because the model
is capturing the dynamics it should get the wind forecast right too, the
only error is likely to be track and possibly depth. Alex, models have moved
a vast amount since the days of 1987, those models could be run on a modern
day PC, nowadays a fast supercomputer is required.

Will
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