...another windy day

Graffitti, Hengistbury Head Remote Radio Station, June 2016

Remote Radio

Doggerland

"...severe winter storms would bring storm surges and exceptionally high tides."
Doggerland, The Attacking Ocean, Brian Fagan (2013)

Storm Surge

1953 East Coast Flood

Storm Surge, 1953

"What is a storm surge?
A storm surge is possibly one of the most dramatic weather events for the east coast. These are caused when deep depressions track east from the Atlantic, passing close to the north of Scotland. As the depressions move across the ocean the lower pressure ccauses the sea level to rise - for each 1 hPa drop in pressure sea levels rise by up to 1cm - and the winds push the surface waters of the sea forward, a motion known as 'wind drift'.

On reaching the relatively shallow North Sea this water is forced southwards, eventually causing a pile up of water in the south. This is because the water cannot escape through the narrow Dover Strait and the English Channel and so gets trapped in the southern North Sea. The effect is enhanced by the strong northerly winds experienced on the rear flank of the depression as it continues eastwards"
Met Office website

Storm Event - 31st January 1953 - The worst national peacetime disaster to hit the UK 

 

Cover: Detail from England's Great Loss (1703), engraving, The Storm (Penguin Classics) Paperback, 2005

"The Storm (1704) is a pioneering work of journalism and science reporting by British author Daniel Defoe. It has been called the first substantial work of modern journalism, the first detailed account of a hurricane in Britain^.. It relates the events of a week-long storm that hit London starting on 24 November and reaching its height on the night of 26/27 November 1703."
Wikipedia

"For Defoe, bankrupt and just released from prison for seditious writings, the storm struck during one of his bleakest moments."

The Storm (Penguin Classics) Paperback, 2005, by Daniel Defoe (author), Richard Hamblyn (author)

"Defoe always liked to introduce the sound of multiple voices on the page, just as he liked to introduce the complexity of multiple points of view, and one of the technical distinctions of The Storm is the way in which these effects are used to suggest the crowded simultaneity of the events it describes. As Paula R. Backsheider has pointed out, 'The Storm has sections that show simultaneous events vertically and horizontally; in one moment we may know events in a single house, in adjacent houses, in several parts of town, and in neighboring towns. The book locates events so closely together that the sequence seems to be a single event, each discrete part so integral to the whole that it is indistinguishable from the whole except in memory.'* 
...the action of The Storm is concentrated...into a single night of destruction and its aftermath. This is what gives the book such a powerful sense of immediacy and crisis, and, as the picture of a shared catastrophe unfolds before us, Defoe has us listen not only to the sounds of the high wind rising but also to the voices of the eyewitnesses, who clamour for a chance to add their stories and words to the account."

The Storm (Penguin Classics) Paperback, 2005, by Daniel Defoe (author), Richard Hamblyn (author)
*Paula R. Backscheider, Daniel Defoe: Ambition & Innovation (Lexington, Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky, 1986), pp. 86-87 

 

The Great Storm, 1703

Known as the Great Storm of 1703, and described by [Daniel] Defoe as "The Greatest, the Longest in Duration, the widest in Extent, of all the Tempests and Storms that History gives any Account of since the Beginning of Time."

The GREAT STORM coincided with an increase in English journalism and was the first weather event to be a news story on a national scale. Special issue broadsheets were produced detailing damage to property and stories of people who had been killed.
Wikipedia

The Great Storm of 1703 was a destructive extratropical cyclone that struck central and southern England on 26 November (7 December in today’s calendar), 1703. High winds caused 2,000 chimney stacks to collapse in London, and winds damaged New Forest, which lost 4,000 oaks. Ships were blown hundreds of miles off-course, and over 1,000 seamen died on the Goodwin Sands alone. News bulletins of casualties and damage were sold all over England – a novelty at that time. The Church of England declared that the storm was God’s vengeance for the sins of the nation. Daniel Defoe thought it was a divine punishment for poor performance against Catholic armies in the War of the Spanish Succession.
Wikipedia

A Sailor's Table of Degrees

'The Storm' (1704), Daniel Defoe

'Great storm in the Downs' by Frederick Whymper