Gusts recorded at 115km/h at Ballyhaise weather station

Areas across County Cavan were blasted by wind speeds of up to 115 kilometres per hour, provisional data emerging from the Met Éireann monitored weather station at Ballyhaise has shown.

Ballyhaise AWS is situated within the grounds of the Teagasc agricultural campus, measuring everything from air, soil earth and grass temperature to rainfall, wind speed and direction, atmospheric pressure, relative humidity, global radiation, as well as cloud height and amount.

Last Friday, January 24, during the worst of Storm Éowyn, the weather monitoring equipment, located 78 metres above mean sea level, clocked the strongest gust blowing between 7-8am at 115km/h.

It was the third strongest ever recorded at the local facility - the highest clocked at 122 km/h on January 8, 2005.

The highest provisional mean (10-min-mean) wind speed on Friday was recorded between 5-6am, at a strength of 65km/h.

Met Éireann confirmed that during Friday’s storm gusts topped out with a sustained wind speed of 135km/h at 4am at Ceann Mhása (Mace Head), Co Galway. Within an hour, wind speeds measured at that same location in Connamara were up to 183km/h, surpassing that of 1945, when the last highest wind speed was recorded.

Storm Éowyn, was one of the most powerful wind events to hit Ireland since the so-called “night of the big wind” in 1839.