Dublin’s ‘Storm Ulysses’ of February 1903, and other major Irish windstorms of the last 200 years
On 26-27 February 1903 a violent windstorm affected Britain and Ireland, causing many deaths, numerous shipwrecks, and widespread damage to infrastructure. The damage in Ireland inspired a passage in James Joyce’s novel Ulysses, and as a result this windstorm has become known as Storm Ulysses. This talk describes the storm, its effects and its importance, combining both contemporary accounts and modern reanalysis techniques, based upon the paper by Hawkins et al (2023), together with other major windstorms affecting Britain and Ireland since 1800. One of these is Ireland’s ‘Great Storm’ of January 1839, for which similar data rescue and reanalysis work is currently in hand.
Hawkins, E., et al., 2023: Rescuing historical weather observations improves quantification of severe windstorm risks. Nat. Hazards Earth Syst. Sci., 23: pp. 1465–1482 doi: 10.5194/nhess-23-1465-2023.
