Any truth in the old “Equinoctial gale” chestnut?
On Wednesday, September 18, 2013 2:17:13 PM UTC+1, exmetman wrote:
Hi
I thought I would spend a morning looking to see if there was any truth in the old ‘equinoctial gale’ chestnut. I know most people poo-poo the idea that gales are more frequent at periods close to the equinoxes as a popular misconception, but I thought I would try to be a bit more scientific about it, and look at the facts. The only data series that I think could help in this regard was the Lamb-Jenkinson Objective series that is maintained and made freely available by the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia. It uses a grid of mean sea level pressures across the UK to objectively obtain (amongst other indices) the Lamb Weather classification for each day of the year back to 1871. The units for the ‘Gale Day’ may well be in geostrophic ‘knots’, but I have decided to play safe and just display them as ‘units’ in my chart until someone – maybe one of my readers – can inform me differently. The units don’t really matter greatly anyway as long as the method is the applied across the whole data set.
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