Remember the Great Storm of October 1987? The one immortalised by BBC meteorologist Michael Fish assuring people that no hurricane was on the way? The one that went on to develop 115mph winds, felling 15 million trees across the UK, including six of the seven iconic oaks of Sevenoaks? Thankfully storms like this are rare, but a new study reveals that we’re likely to see more of them as the planet warms.
The Great Storm was both a “weather bomb” and a “sting jet”. Weather bombs are classified as storms where the air pressure drops by more than 24 millibars within 24 hours, whilst sting jets are blasts of air that accelerate as they plummet, generating powerful surface winds and localised gusts.
Oscar Martinez-Alvarado from the University of Reading, and colleagues used a climate model to simulate extreme storms both now and by 2100. Their results, published in Environmental Research Letters, show that if greenhouse gases continue to rise then the chances of North Atlantic storms becoming weather bombs with sting jets more than doubles. “We think that larger atmospheric moisture content is the reason behind the increase,” writes Martinez Alvarado in the Department of Meteorology blog. “Increased numbers of storms would wreak havoc on people’s lives and leave Britain facing a spiralling clean-up bill.”
