BBC weather by Bill Giles few hours before storm of 1987

Bill Giles was cool

Having said all that.. the winds in this system were of hurricane *force*. The US National Hurricane Center defines hurricane force to be 64knots (75mph) sustained for at least one minute. On the South Coast, some places had *hourly* sustained winds of 85mph.. this would extrapolate to one minute sustained up to 100mph.. ie category 2 strength. In the aftermath, the Met Office definitely downplayed the strength of this storm,probably to offset the perceived (but embarrassing) faux-pas!

This storm was an Atlantic depression with 2 or 3 airmasses separated by frontal zones, with the strongest winds offset from the center. A *hurricane* is a tropical entity, a warm core system, it does not have fronts, has a circular structure with concentric rainbands, and the strongest winds are always found in the "eyewall", a ring of potent thunderstorms around the calm eye. Hurricanes and extratropical depressions are different types of storm. Fish and Giles were (technically) correct.

The woman who called was referring to Hurricane Floyd in the Caribbean, 3000 miles away from the UK. And... please, people... the Oct 87 event was a mid-latitude windstorm: hurricanes are an entirely different beast and do *NOT* occur in western Europe.. they never have and never will. Quite often, the remnants of former hurricanes can make it across the Atlantic in "extra-tropical" format, but the Oct. '87 storm was not even that. It developed in the bay of Biscay.

Giles was not that far off. It only took a small error of a few 10s of miles for the violent winds that were forecast in the Channel to extend into populated areas as well.

Ok so if that was the case and a violent storm was that close to hitting than why didn't they put an an advanced warning out on the off chance that the storms predicted track was ever so slightly wrong?

Which of course prooved to be the case!

yeah the Met Office screwed the pooch on that one.
A woman actually called them to say she had been watching the weather conditions and she thought a Hurricane was coming...and those geniuses said she was wrong !!!

Giles was not that far off. It only took a small error of a few 10s of miles for the violent winds that were forecast in the Channel to extend into populated areas as well. Government spending cuts hampered the forecasting: the Thatcher administration had axed a weather ship prior, which would have relayed data from Biscay where the storm bombed. Lucky it didnt track a little further North than it did... the winds in the Channel were even stronger than on the coast.

at least the could say that the weather is unpredictable and we are getting paid for nothing and stop playing with our minds! The bbc forecast changes every second like the clock!

lol ye a bit breezy

Though he was in charge so I suppose he let a mi no like Fish get the blame for the cock up?