Lessons from our weather history go down a storm
THE storm season now being well and truly upon us, I decided it was time to research the worst of the weather that has ever come our way.
Daniel Defoe’s 1704 book, The Storm, chronicled in great detail the dreadful events of the Great Storm of 1703 which battered Britain the previous winter and was described by Queen Anne as “a calamity so dreadful and astonishing, that the like hath not been seen or felt”.
The hurricane tore across the country, killing an estimated 8,000 people on land and sea. Defoe recorded oaks being snapped in half like matchsticks and one ship at Whitstable in Kent lifted from the sea and dropped 250 yards inland.
In the early 1990s, the late Hubert Lamb, founder of the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit, decided to map Britain’s historic storms on a “severity index”, which took into account factors including wind speed, total damage to landscape and property, and lives lost both human and animal.
The most severe storm according to Lamb’s index was the great hurricane of 1987 – which scored 20,000 – followed by the storms of 1792 (12,000), 1825 (12,000) and 1694 (10,000, but with the caveat that this storm is poorly known because it occurred so long ago). The 1703 storm scored 9,000, despite its infamy in collective memory.
The matrix established by Mr Lamb shows that storms are only getting worse as our sea temperatures rise and climate warms. Only a few months ago the Met Office warned that England and Wales should prepare for a 1 in 3 chance of a monthly rainfall record in at least one region each winter.
For this weekend, however, things seem relatively calm. The heavy winds are diminished and in between some thundery showers expect sunny spells. Typical autumn weather, in other words, or the calm before the storm? Joe Shute