Weather forecasts for the North Sea were poorly understood until the 1960s and 1970s. Stories from yachtsmen and trawler skippers of unexpectedly severe gales as a stretch of the truth or just blatant exaggeration, reported wave heights of 20 metres plus were discarded without investigation and without question. If these reports didn’t fit the weather charts for that time and area that were prepared in the forecast office then, it was argued that they must be wrong.
All this changed 35 years ago, with the advent of oil and gas exploration rigs that began to appear in the North Sea. The companies involved in the running of the rigs required upto date weather forecasts not only for safety purposes but in order to maximise the time that the rigs were working. The rigs were also fitted with state of the art monitoring sensors, which recorded the weather and Sea State automatically from various positions in the North Sea.
It soon became clear that, on certain occasions, the weather forecasts badly underestimated the severity of the winds and sea conditions. For the first time meteorologists accepted that some of their predictions were wide of the mark, because they now had cast iron instrumental evidence, and realised that the problem had to be addressed sooner rather than later. Weather reports from areas of the North Sea grew and forecasters were able to redraw their charts to fit these reports. This revealed a number of features, which had previously been unknown.
By the 1980s a substantial archive of detailed meteorological records had been collected, and it was now the turn of the climatologists to lend a hand. They analysed all the new data and devised a new formal clmatology for the North Sea. It was confirmed that the strongest winds and highest seas came in nothwesterlies in open waters of the southern North Sea. But many were surprised to discover that southeasterlies brought the roughest weather to the northern half of the region. And it was shown that, under special circumstances, waves 30 metres high and more can occur in the northern part of the North Sea.
Data extracted from an article by Philip Eden, a columnist for the paper “All At Sea”
“I hope this hasn’t put anyone off sailing on the North Sea, but you can’t go sailing round and round the marina forever. Listen to the forecasts get out there and enjoy yourselves”. Editor