UK faces record wet winters, study says

Britain faces a future of record-breaking wet winters, potentially leading to more of the widespread flooding seen in recent years, according to new modelling that incorporates changing climate patterns.

England and Wales now have a 34 per cent chance of record rainfall between October and March, the study by the government’s Met Office said yesterday. In 2013, heavy rain deluged parts of Cornwall and the south east.

That was followed by three named storms that flooded some of Cumbria, Lancashire and Yorkshire in December 2015, while Storm Angus battered parts of Britain last November.

Supercomputer

Changing weather patterns caused by increasing global temperatures means meteorologists can no longer rely on historical rainfall records to predict future weather events.

Instead, a new supercomputer at the Met Office simulated thousands of possible scenarios using current climate patterns.

“This gave many more extreme events than have happened in the real world, helping us work out how severe things could get,” Adam Scaife, lead researcher on the study, said in a statement.