Keep a Sou'wester handy

2014 is starting where the last one ended, with forecasts of gales, heavy rain and flooding.

Spring 2013 was the coldest spring in the Central England temperature series since 1891, March was bitter with heavy snow.  Thankfully the summer was a good one, ending a run of six grey and wet summers from 2007 to 2012.  July was the sunniest month with 144% of the average sunshine hours.  Autumn saw some decent weather but October was the wettest month with 127% of the average rainfall.  It concluded with the damaging storm of the 28th.  December was stormy and rather mild.

With the ground saturated now after weeks of unsettled weather it does not take much precipitation to worsen the flood situation.  Here are some photos of Christchurch that we took over the Christmas holidays.

Apparently a switch in the jet stream is being blamed for the havoc.  Jonathan Leake writing in the Sunday Times - Britain's meteorologists have coined a new term for the succession of storms battering the nation: the Ebdon effect.  They believe the remarkable succession of powerful storms that have crossed the Atlantic to assault the country with gales and rain are linked to the equatorial jet stream, a giant belt of air that flows around the entire globe, at a height of 10 to 25 miles above the equator.  In 1975 Bob Ebdon, a little-known Met office scientist, discovered that when the equatorial jet stream changes direction and starts flowing west to east along the equator - as now - it sharply raises the risk of a succession of powerful storms hitting Britain.  The current flow, from west to east, means the equatorial jet stream is flowing in the same direction as the polar jet stream that brings Britain its weather.  This allows the polar jet stream to grow stronger and move north, which in turn increases our exposure to depressions and storms that would otherwise have hit southern Europe.  The polar jet stream also gets stronger and has exceeded 220mph - nearly twice as strong as normal - on many occasions this winter.

What next the Killer Chiller from America where New York had 24inches of snow in one day!

It is winter after all.