The Weather Notebook: Waves of Another Time

Waves of Another Time
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Dave Thurlow, Host

Cape Clear Island, Ireland
Hi, I'm Dave Thurlow from the Mount Washington Observatory and this is The Weather Notebook. For me, when the first heavy snow falls in the winter and the landscape looks much different than before, it looks as though I'm in a different place all together. Ireland commentator Chuck Kruger was transported to another place when an offshore storm sent waves crashing into Cape Clear Island's South Harbor:

"Suspicious of the southeasterly at work, and aware of roar, I venture outside to scan Clear Island's mile-long South Harbor. Despite almost daily exploration of this stretch of sea for the last half-dozen years, I fail to spot my landmarks. It's as if I've been transported.

West, in the middle of the harbor, waves rise forty feet into the air, collide with each other, brilliant white plumes blasting skyward in sudden dazzles of sunlight that break through black squalls. Then these monsters begin breaking, cascading down, and, as they approach the shore, rear up again and cover cliffs and lower pastures. Occasionally a wave rams into a cave where Spanish smugglers held court in Ireland two hundred years ago, a reverberating, catathonic shudder shaking the very atmosphere as part of the giant comes to a precipitate halt.

Standing next to our kitchen garden, brussels sprouts blackening in the wind, I glance north, down onto the inner harbor, where yachts lie at an anchor through the summer months. The pier breakwater works as effectively as a wicker fence at halting a stampeding bull. Waves burst over it as though it isn't there. Others curl along the entire length of the hundred-yard pier. Where I've picked sea pinks with my granddaughter has become a maelstrom.

That night, in the island pub, a fisherman confides in me that he hasn't seen waves like these since 1971. But, sure, isn't that always the way when a storm begins in the Bay of Biscay?"

Chuck Kruger is an author and storyteller from Cape Clear Island, County Cork Ireland. Thanks to Subaru and the National Science Foundation.