Shame, I was looking forward to the return of Codge in time for winter and winding up the Brexiteers

I would clarify that I never claimed it actually would be a hurricane when it hit Ireland, I was mostly defending the mere possibility that it could. Since my defence was so impassioned (and I absolutely stand by it) I didn't want to give the impression that I was predicting a hurricane landfall. I forecasted a 60% chance at the most when it was upgraded to Cat3 but most of the time I went with only around a 30% chance of it actually happening. Now its almost 0% but it will get to the same latitude as France probably and may even enter Irish territorial water. 

Arpege 12z animation showing wind gust speeds tomorrow:

Meteo France Arpege 12z charts wind gust charts show the expected impact of #Ophelia tomorrow https://t.co/bDSOaKdd3X pic.twitter.com/JBtzFFYPnL

— TheWeatherOutlook (@TWOweather) October 15, 2017

Still a few scary looking charts for next Saturday showing up on the GEFS. 

In the 12z suite the three stormiest are perturbations 6, 17 and 20

Number 20 is about as bad as it gets

http://modeles7.meteociel.fr/modeles/gens/run/gens-20-1-132.png?12

I'd be tying things down if I lived on the southern Irish coast!

Potentially up to 70mph here, which will be the strongest winds for some time.

OK if I want to be ultra pedantic.....

Left is Hurricane Ophelia (yes its still a hurricane as determined by the NHC in their official 5pm AST time update released just after 5pm AST(~9:30pm here), NHC takes precedent over the metoffice; I'm not sure why they prematurely declared it as post tropical.

Anyway NHC next declares in 6 hours. I'm going to assume Ophelia will not last that long as a tropical system. So instead I have put on the right a map of Ireland's marine territory. I reckon it can make the 50 or so mile journey in the next hour that it needs to to get into it.

Therefore MattyH I think we can say with reasonable confidence that Ophelia was a Hurricane in Ireland's mainland territorial waters. But no, not at landfall. But probably enough to defend the mere assertion that a landfall is not impossible wouldn't you say?

 

Its still tropical. Its basically a Sandy type system now. Large extratropical depression with a small hurricane embedded in the centre. Warm seclusion probably developing ontop of decaying warm core.

GFS op has Brian quite menacing, but UKMO less severe

1) Ahead of ex-Hurricane Ophelia, we had an easterly wind this morning along with some heavy rain.

2) The chart for Wednesday shows a weather system moving up from the south very slowly over the southern half of England and Wales with easterly winds to the north of that, here over Scotland.

3) At the weekend, there is the possibility of some disruptive weather over the south of England in particular from a weather system what could end up being named as Storm Brian (which I'm sure, wouldn't actually be named after the very person who created this site (and indeed, this forum) in the first place). According to the latest model output, that system would be taking a more southerly track than normal which would take the actual centre of low pressure across the north of England. For here in Scotland, that would result in the winds possibly starting off from the SE before backing E, then NE and finally N as that low pressure system moved away so once again, we would be in yet another position where we are experiencing easterly winds.

When you add all of that together, there is quite a high frequency of easterly winds in that model output for the northern half of the UK in particular with that being less of the case in the south where everything is more westerly and zonal. Since we have actually had very little in the way of easterly winds in recent months, that means that for here in Scotland, we would actually end up seeing more in the way of easterly winds if all of that was to come off, than what we have seen for quite a while.

So that therefore, has to leave a lot of people here in Scotland looking at this as a possible 'if only it were winter' scenario since that might potentially be quite a cold run there if this were actually the middle of winter, since there would probably be the potential there, for some decent snow events on the northern edge of these low pressure systems if this was the middle of winter, especially over high ground. It would therefore be interesting to hear what others think about that.

GFS continues to depict an intense event for southern UK on Saturday, and ECM has now jumped on board.

The seed for this begins as a tropical disturbance in the Bahamas, but unlike Ophelia it looks to have a hard time achieving much more than weak tropical storm status during its journey over here.

This does not, however, have any real limiting effect on the potential intensity of the storm most of us receive; the baroclinic processes dominate the intensity in all but the most exceptional cases, of which Ophelia now stands as the prime example in modern records (the core held together long enough to deliver its own small region of particularly strong gusts and heavy rain to SW Ireland while baroclinic processes were responsible for the winds blasting Ireland from the S/SE). 

Instead it's ideal or near-ideal timing of the ex-tropical feature relative to the jet stream that matters, and this reduces confidence in it reaching notable intensity, as any error in timing could have a large effect on the peak wind gusts the UK sees - much more so than in the case of Ophelia which had an impressively long lead-time in terms of looking more likely than not to affect the western half of the UK.

The slower solutions of the ECM 00z and to a lesser extent UKMO 12z also peaked the storm west of the UK, further reducing the peak gusts. At the other extreme, the 00z GFS (below-right) had pretty much perfect timing for maximising the wind gusts, whereas the 12z (below-left) is close but not quite there. That it still takes gusts into the mid-70s along the Channel gives cause to raise an eyebrow - some leeway here without the storm becoming entirely run-of-the-mill - but nothing more at this stage.

Oh and then there's GEM, which deepens the low to 965 mb - a whole 10 mb below GFS and ECM - and would bring peak gusts to near 90 mph inland, but thankfully this model is known for getting carried away with LP development;

Cold air moving into place over Russia next week - sudden appearance of lots of blue there

http://www.wxmaps.org/pix/temp4.html

Pretty good agreement for a buzzsaw lp this Friday / Saturday. I don't like the look of this at all. How ironic if #StormBrian takes my house roof off.

Some of those GEFS, and more notably perhaps the ECM 00z, develop that 'buzzsaw' well west of the UK as an extremely compact low, suggesting tropical characteristics at that time, with the system then degrading as it goes east yet remaining potent even as far across as the UK. There is some suggestion of a double-peak similar to Ophelia; one while tropical, then another while ex-tropical following a weaker spell during transition. 

The second peak is what gives cause for concern over here, though it's good to see the 00z models generally trending a bit west with the location of that. 

Meanwhile, overshadowed by the Fri-Sat potential, what was a vigorous looking low for Thursday on the 12z runs yesterday is now not amounting to much at all - that's some major variation at such short range and makes the difference between 60 mph and 30 mph peak gusts for southern parts.

Longer-term, strong signals for the westerly momentum to fall off a cliff and leave us with either a long settled spell or a long showery spell. Trouble is, the models have already strongly indicated completely the wrong broad patterns on two occasions these past 8 weeks, so I'm not inclined to trust them as much as I usually would when looking at the general large-scale tendencies (and that's even not a huge amount of trust anyway!).

GEFS suggest Brian will bomb before it gets to us and then weaken, but still plenty of time for that to change