Flooding in Britain: Anatomy of a storm
We have taken a battering lately, and our winter woes are not over yet. Forecasters at the Met Office say the weather will turn much colder over the next week or so, bringing frost, ice and even snow – a disaster for those whose homes have been flooded and are still full of water.
“We are sitting in the battlefield between two weather systems,” says the Met Office chief meteorologist, Paul Davies. One is pushing in from Scandinavia, threatening extreme cold. The other – which has been winning for the past month – is coming across the Atlantic from North America.
At times like this, the weather charts on banks of screens at the futuristic Met Office headquarters near Exeter look like war maps. Arrows show the forces of destruction have been gathering far to the west and rushing across the ocean at phenomenal wind speeds of up to 270mph, bringing torrential rain and mighty waves.
“Getting storms is one thing, but the wind is what has made this exceptional,” says the forecaster Helen Chivers, after the stormiest calendar month since 1969. Lives have been lost, defences destroyed, homes ruined.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/topics/weather/10564661/storms-met-office-flooding-weather.html
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