Storm Isha: Parts of UK hit by strongest winds in decades – with Storm Jocelyn on the way

Four people have died in the UK and Ireland as Storm Isha’s 100-mile-per-hour winds tore down trees, caused transport chaos and left hundreds of thousands without power.

Some areas in the UK experienced the strongest winds they’ve seen for two decades and another named storm is on the way.

Storm Jocelyn is due to blast the UK and Ireland with more strong winds and heavy rain tomorrow.

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It tore across the country in the early hours of this morning storm Isa lashed coastlines and communities from Cornwall to Cumbria to here in cumber where the winds were strong enough to rip off this roof it was just a loud banging and a lot of noise a lot of Rumble you can

Hear the roof like moving about and you can see it flying off and Dey which is coming through into the post out the windows trees were uprooted thousands of homes were left without power as the cleanup operation got underway we learned the storm had also claimed lives

On this road in grouth an 84y old man died after a car he was a passenger in crashed into a Fallen Tree three other people lost their lives after crashes in Northern Ireland and ireland1 Serv has been canell on the railways disruption stretched beyond the morning rush hour here in Scotland trains were

Canceled at 700 p.m. yesterday evening at Glasgow central people have been queuing in the rain this morning waiting for checks to be carried out for the first services to start running again how long have you been waiting for uh a couple hours couple hours in the r yep

Please to be moving then oh delighted thank you very much I did try and go home last night and had to come back again oh gosh so glad to be off now finally hopefully yes thank you coming in a little bit hotter than normal I think and it wasn’t any smoother in the

Air bumpy Landings for many of those who did make it to their intended destinations but dozens of flights were also cancelled or diverted passengers trying to travel from tenar to Edinburgh were taking can buy their pilot to Germany instead for a safer landing at points you were

Thinking God this is this is going to be I didn’t think it was going to be this rough you know and H the plan was doing things that you just didn’t expect it to do you know it seemed to almost turn Corners in the air you know and then

They came on and told us we were going to go to go to Cologne in Germany and and that’s where we landed at 1:00 this morning 11:00 in Edinburgh Ed airport a lone suitcase was filmed making its own travel Arrangements on the runway a rare lighter moment in what was a worrying

Night for many and now Focus shifts to the 10th name storm in five months Joselin is on the way tomorrow forecast to be a step down from Storm Isa in terms of intensity it will still Heap more misery on communities and commuters especially in Scotland where all train services

Will be suspended again tomorrow evening and into Wednesday’s Rush Hour Katherine Samson let’s speak now to Professor Lizzie kendan who is a scientist at the Met Office Lizzy Isa was the ninth named storm Joseline would be the 10th named storm in this season last year we only got two is there

Anything to read into that at all so yeah so there have been a lot of name storms recently um in terms of um whether this is there’s any Trends here I think it’s very difficult to say at this stage um we do we have only been naming storms actually since 2015 um so

It’s hard at this stage to identify any underlying Trends um I think we can say though that the UK climate is changing there is definitely evidence that is changing both in the context of temperature records and very heavy rainfall so I guess the sort of impacts we’ve been seeing with the recent storms

Is kind of an indication of the sort of changes that we might expect in the future you mentioned very heavy rainfall we saw those devastating floods recently then we’re going to look at a graph now that shows if you go back I think to the 1840s the dotted line on this graph will

Show our viewers a trend that we is getting wetter and wetter every winter why is that so I think firstly what this graphic you’re showing here very nicely demonstrates is the huge variability that we’re seeing and from year to year but you’re absolutely right there is an underlying Trend in rainfall and we’re

Getting more more rainfall more heavy rainfall and that is essentially due to the fact that our climate is warming so as the climate warms um the atmosphere is able to hold more moisture and a first order effect of that is that we see a greater increase in the intensity of rainfall um

In terms of flooding though whether rainfall directly translates to flooding is it’s very complicated it’s not simply a straightforward of how the rainfall is changing it’s also um the subtlety of how how much rainfall has fallen in the past so whether the catchment itself is very wet it’s due to the characteristics

And the management of that catchment and one of the things that we are finding increasingly in very in newest the newest research is that there may well be changes in the kind of clustering events through time so we may get a succession of of very extreme events very heavy rainfall um which obviously

Exacerbates the impacts and that’s something we’re we’re kind of seeing here with the recent storms where you know the next storm that we’re getting is coming when people are still very much um cleaning up from the last storm and so they’re much more potentially vulnerable to the impacts of the next

Storm coming along the way and your expertise isn’t it Professor Kendon is very long-term forecast we’re talking maybe 50 60 years and what are you finding then about how climate change impacts the weather in the long term so yeah so we’ve been running the the weather forecast mode that we’re all

Familiar with but in climate change so running right out to the end of the century so understanding how our weather patterns are going to evolve through time from now right out to to 20180 um and what we can see is that um you know if we look at something like

Record-breaking events for example which captures the public attention that we do see um those sort of occurrences of those events expected to increase in the future um you know the sort of rainfall that can lead to maybe flash flooding maybe more for like four times more

Frequent by the end of the century if we follow a high emission scenario so these are a really big changes in in the kind of characteristics of the type of rainfall we may get um so this is talking about you know maybe short duration rainfall which is important for

For flash flooding longer duration which is important for maybe more um rivers over topping and flooding in in low-lying areas and also there’s changes due to sea level rise and propensity for coastal flooding so it’s coming at us from all many different directions and and what’s really important I think to

Get across is that what we’ve observed in the past isn’t an indication of what’s to come yeah that’s very interesting Lizzy kendan Professor Kendon thank you so much for speaking with us thank you