UK Storm

What I would say about the UK Storm if I were reporting it in the papers...


It's going to be very blowy indeed for a time on Sunday night/ Monday morning.  We're looking at sustained winds of around 35mph on the south coast.  The Beaufort Scale looks only at sustained mean wind speeds, so that means it's a Force 7.  That is not a gale - it is a "high wind".

We won't talk about individual gust speeds and hype them up by misleading people by using the words "hurricane force winds" because one gust measured 100mph off the coast of the Isle of Wight.  For it to be a Force 12 "hurricane" storm we need mean mean speeds of 80mph.  We are well short of that on land.  It's fair to say that on sea conditions are far worse.  Remember, though, the shipping forecast does not reflect conditions here.

Some trees will come down in a Force 7.  This is usual and it happens every autumn, particularly when there are still lots of leaves on them.  Because of this, you should be sensible and avoided wooded areas in this weather.  If you can stay at home, great, but don't be terrified to leave your home assuming you use some common sense.  That's particularly important when driving.  Trees can come down very suddenly.

In the Great Storm of 1987, 15 million trees came down across Britain.  It was a Force 12 storm.  Winds stayed at 80 mph+ for over 3 hours.  Again, that's not what we are faced with here.  Talk of preparing evacuation routes and stock piling emergency supplies only serves to worry people needlessly.  Expect every paper to publish photos of the trees that have come down, to try to give the impression that the whole of the tree stock of Britain has been felled.  It hasn't.

The beach is a particularly silly place to be hanging out.  Gusts can easily carry your dog away, and swimming is absurdly dangerous.  Avoid them, no matter how "fun" you might think it is to watch the weather from there.

There will be some things to clean up after the winds have gone down.  That's autumn in a wet, windy island off the North Coast of Europe.  Prepare for the "After the Big Storm, now the Big Clean Up" headlines in the papers.  They're as inevitable as rainy bank holidays are in England.

Don't let the above spoil your fun in enjoying STORMAGGEDON though.  We British love it when the temperature veers 5C from the norm, or when the weather does anything other than drizzle.  It's precisely because we don't have any extremes of weather here that we are so obsessed with it.