UK set for record breaking worst year as Storm Jocelyn named during Isha chaos
The UK is on track for its record breaking worst ever year for storms since records began.
Storm Isha battered the country overnight, bringing 99mph winds to the country amid an amber weather warning that covered most of the country. This season has seen nine storms already, and is well on track to break the record, the Mirror can reveal.
Set in 2015/16, when naming storms began, the furthest along the alphabet of names the UK has seen was when Storm Katie hit. This year, the country has already suffered through nine successive storms, with the possibility of a tenth just around the corner.
This has set us well on track to have a record breaking bad year for storms. In 2015/16, the storm beginning with the letter I struck in February, where Isha is already fading away this morning - around a month ahead of the record.
Alongside that, Storm Jocelyn, the next storm, has already been named by Met Eireann with it set to hit as soon as Tuesday or Wednesday, with the Met having already issued weather warnings for the coming low pressure system. This leaves the country with just two storms from now until August, when the storm season ends, to break the record.
Gales, snow and rain to batter country today with 80mph wind gusts
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It isn’t guaranteed of course that the record will tumble as storms can be immensely variable within seasons, as well as between them. But the current trend this season has most definitely set the country up to blast through the record, with more wet and windy conditions likely ahead.
Stephen Dixon, a spokesperson for the Met Office, told the Mirror: "Since we’ve been naming storms the furthest we’ve got through the alphabet of names is Katie - which happened in March 2016. In the first storm naming year we got to Storm Katie. And obviously we’ve just had Isha, the next storm would be Jocelyn, then Kathleen after that.
"We got to Katie in the 2015/16 storm season, and in that year, the storm for I which was Imogen hit in February, so we’re ahead of that. The thing to note is that it’s quite variable, in terms of storms we named last year we only had two named storms ourselves, there were a couple of other storms that glanced the UK, including Otto and Noah, that were named by other agencies. Storms are variable by nature, we get peaks of troughs of storm activity.
Emergency services at the scene where scaffolding has been dislodged in Belfast City centre during Storm Isha (PA)"One of the factors particularly of storms in the UK is the position of the jetstream and how it influences low pressure systems that move in off the Atlantic … that’s one of the principle factors of how many of these deep areas of low pressure we get in the UK across a storm naming year.
"There’s some wet and windy weather on the way, on Tuesday, particularly windy in the north of the UK on Tuesday into Wednesday. It’s not a system we’re naming at the moment, but we name storms with the Irish Met Service and KNMI (Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute) and there’s a chance that one of those might want to name that system. That’s one we’re keeping an eye on in the more immediate term, so we have already got a yellow wind warning out for that low pressure zone."
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