Is global warming to blame?

16 January 1993

The intense storms that have battered Shetland in the past week, sending
the Braer onto the rocks at Garth’s Ness, are part of a pattern of increasingly
extreme weather and waves in the North Atlantic that is intriguing both
meteorologists and oceanographers.

According to Sheldon Bacon at the Institute of Oceanographic Sciences
(IOS) at Wormley, in Surrey, average waves in the North Atlantic around
Shetland are 50 per cent higher than they were during the 1960s, with storm
waves 10 per cent higher.

The waves are whipped up by winds in the North Atlantic that are themselves
created by the ever-deeper atmospheric low pressures being experienced in
the area. Last Sunday, as hurricane winds prevented salvage of the Braer,
barometers around Shetland dropped to 915 millibars, their lowest level
since records began a century ago.

‘We have had a whole series of very deep depressions crossing the Atlantic
this winter,’ said Barry Parker of the Meteorological Office. ‘It all seems
to be tied up with a steepening gradient in sea temperatures. There is lots
of ice between Iceland and Greenland, but the seas are warm further south,
round the British Isles.’ John Gould at the IOS says that ‘coupled with
the storms of 1987 and 1990, there is evidence we seem to be entering an
era of strong storms, which might be associated with global warming’.