Author
Jarno Schipper - ZAMG
Introduction
A storm with hurricane-force winds battered Northern Europe during the weekend of 8-9 January 2005. The storm which was named Gudrun (a.k.a. as Erwin) took 17 lives and severely disrupted sea, air and land transport. The financial damages it invoked would sum up to billions of euro's. Floods and powerful winds hit the region, cutting power to 100,000s of houses. The storm ripped roofs from houses and caused widespread property damage. The UK was severely hit as strong winds and floods caused widespread damage. Northern Europe Region was the most affected area and meteorologists said the storm was one of the worst to hit the region in years. Forest damage in Sweden was the worst recorded in recent history (estimation of 150 million felled trees) which caused disruption to power supplies, phone lines and railway traffic. (source Danish Meteorological Institute). By the time the depression start to fill up it hit the Baltic States. In Latvia, powerful winds hit the country’s coastal regions, toppling up to 5 million m3 (176 million cubic feet) of wood and tearing roofs off houses. It belied to be that the storm was the worst to hit Latvia in 40 years.This case study will present a compilation of events in which the storm is discussed using several satellite image of the various Meteosat 8 channels as well as images with NWP superimposed on them. The severity of this case and the impact it had is also reflected by the numerous NMSs which proposed this case to EUMeTrain. The mini case studie is further supplemented with a chapter "interactive overlays". In this chapter you can yourself overlay various numerical parameters on the corresponding satellite imagery. Through this interactive way you can reconstruct the case and exercise with it. If you think you can contribute to this Case study or to EUMeTrain by providing us dates of interesting case studies which happened in your region of interest, we encourage you to please write us using the above e-mail address.
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| Airmass RGB - 8th January 2005:08 UTC - The depression and the cyclogenesis related to it is very much visible as the red area in this image between Scotland and Norway. Also focus on the dry slot (pictured here as a red stripe over Ireland, England and then to Norway) |
Synoptic situation
Below two surface maps of January 8th and 9th are presented. On the first map the depression is located just northeast of Scotland. The second map the depression increased to storm intensity and is found over Finland.
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Synoptic chart - 8th January 2005:06UTC Click to enlarge. |
Synoptic chart - 9th January 2005:06UTC Click to enlarge. |
The following animation shows the track of the cyclone on 8th and 9th of January. Most devastating effect occurred just south of this track.
IR Imagery (Meteosat 8 channel 10.8): time sequence
This chapter shows and briefly describes the development in a sequence of hourly images.
WV Imagery (Meteosat 8 channel 6.2): time sequence
In the following chapter the cloud configurations can be better related to the upper level dynamics using MEteosat 8 - WV6.2 channel.
Meteosat 8 - Airmass RGB: time sequence
The development and especially the physical background is pictured using the Airmass-RGB. The satellite images are each time 1-hour apart.
In the set of Airmass images it can be observed that the location of the jet together with a very large temperature difference between the air masses allows the storm to generate a large amount of energy, affecting its intensity, speed and direction (source Danish Meteorological Institute).