The Met Office has issued a red weather warning due to Storm Eunice, which is hitting southern England and Wales and bringing extremely strong winds, rainfall and flooding.
Exposed coastal areas will experience the worst gusts of the extreme weather event, with a 196 km/h (122 mph) wind speed recorded on the Isle of Wight this morning, Friday 18th February 2022.
Eunice’s impact on sea levels could cause storm surges and severe flood warnings have been issued for parts of the country, including the Severn Estuary and the River Wye in Gloucestershire. In Devon and Cornwall, power cuts have affected more than 50,000 homes, and the BBC reports that Ireland has 73,000 homes and businesses without power.
BBC Weather said Eunice “may well be one of the worst storms in three decades”.
The storm comes just two days after another, Storm Dudley, which hit Scotland and Northern Ireland on February 16.
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An active steam jet will allow to develop then to propel #TwoStorms across the UK this week #StormDudley and #StormEunice will bring disruptive winds from Wednesday afternoon and possibly snow Friday ⚠️ pic.twitter.com/0b8wqZek9c
— Met Office (@metoffice) February 14, 2022
“Following the impacts of Storm Dudley for many on Wednesday, Storm Eunice will bring devastating gusts in what could be one of the hardest hitting storms to affect southern and central UK for a few years,” said the Met’s chief meteorologist. Office, Paul Gundersen.
“Red warning zones indicate significant danger to life, as extremely high winds can damage structures and flying debris.”
Some scientists have suggested that the impact of Storm Eunice – and future storms – has been exacerbated by the climate crisis. But how exactly are rising temperatures affecting the weather in the UK?
Did climate change cause Storm Eunice?
“Very often, the question asked is whether or not an event is due to climate change. But it’s just not a yes or no question,” said Dr Friederike Otto, senior lecturer at the Grantham Institute for Climate Change, Imperial College London.
“Climate change can be one of the causes, and it can make things worse. But this is never the only cause.
In the case of Storm Eunice, the high-velocity winds are unlikely to have been caused by climate change. But, according to Otto, the damage to Britain’s coasts will have been made worse by rising temperatures.
“What we do know is that the rainfall and storm surge from these storms is worse due to climate change.”
Climate change could also push storms higher around the world, said Professor Dann Mitchell, a climatologist at the University of Bristol.
“We know the positioning of these storms could change, and that’s because of the impact of climate change on the jet stream.”
The jet stream is an air current that circles the northern hemisphere, distributing wind and rain, storms and heat waves. It is thought that increasing air temperatures will alter the airflow, causing the jet stream to move further north.
“The jet stream controls the paths of storms, how storms cross the North Atlantic and hit us [in the UK]. So, as climate change causes the jet stream to shift poleward, you would also expect the storm tracks to shift poleward,” Mitchell said.
“We also expect to see deeper penetration of these storm tracks in Europe. So, while it is true to say that the wind itself is not significantly different [due to climate change] yet, in a sense, storm winds will increase somewhere, as they affect places they normally wouldn’t.
How does climate change cause flooding?
Otto said the increase in precipitation is due to something called the thermodynamic effect. “A warmer atmosphere can hold more water vapor and that water vapor has to come out of the atmosphere, which it does as precipitation.”
Currently, one degree of global warming results in a seven percent increase in precipitation during these events. “That doesn’t seem like a lot, but it’s a lot,” Otto said.
Additionally, storm surges that bring water above normal sea level are now even more dangerous. “The storm surges that typically occur with these events are more damaging because sea levels are higher than they would have been without climate change,” Otto said.
“As long as temperate global temperatures rise – and they won’t stop rising until we reach net zero CO2 broadcasts – these events [will get] more frequent and intense. With the current trajectory of greenhouse gas emissions, we will see more flooding, more intense rainfall, and many more hot and long heat waves.
What can be done to protect the UK from the impacts of climate change?
“We have a lot of agency to reduce our vulnerability [to these events]”, Otto said. “Redesigning our cities to have more green space means that water can go somewhere. It doesn’t have to flood homes.
These actions can also help us as heat waves become more frequent. “A lot of the things you need to do to be better protected against floods are the same things you need to do to be better protected against heat waves.
“Green spaces are so important. On the one hand, water can go somewhere and it doesn’t flood houses, but also when you have more green space, temperatures in cities don’t rise so high.
As well as being dangerous to health, heatwaves can spark fires, as seen in February 2019 when temperatures broke records and sparked fires in East Sussex, West Yorkshire and Edinburgh .
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For Mitchell, the question is whether the climate is changing faster than we are adapting.
“At the moment the answer is almost definitely yes. We have more things in place, like trying to avoid building on floodplains, because we know they are going to get worse in the winter. But in terms of national infrastructure, we must do better.
Previous UK storms have damaged coastal infrastructure and affected rail networks, and those things are always a concern in the future, Mitchell said.
About our experts
Professor Friederike Otto is a senior lecturer and honorary research associate at the Environmental Change Institute, University of Oxford. She is co-lead of World Weather Attribution, an initiative that brings together climate scientists from around the world to better understand and communicate how climate change affects extreme weather events.
Professor Dann Mitchell is Professor of Climatology at the University of Bristol. Using climate trend data from the past 100 years, it examines the impact of low-emissions scenarios, such as those consistent with the Paris Agreement on climate change, on human health.
