WHO CAME UP WITH ‘BOMB CYCLONE?’

A BOMB cyclone is formed when the air pressure of a storm plummets by at least 24 millibars in 24 hours, causing huge storms and wind speeds of up to 100mph.

A millibar is simply a unit of measurement used by meteorologists to describe air pressure – the force exerted by the air’s weight.

The standard surface pressure on Earth is 1013.2 millibars, and the lower the pressure drops within a cyclone, the more severe a storm it creates.

On Thursday, Storm Dennis was classified as a bomb cyclone after the pressure dropped by 46 millibars in 24 hours. The name developed in the 1940s and 1950s when experts at Bergen University in Norway began calling storms created over the sea ‘bombs’ because they formed far more quickly than those over land.

By the 1970s, the terms ‘explosive cyclogenesis’ and ‘meteorological bombs’ were being used by Professor Fred Sanders from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in scientific journals.

The term ‘bomb’ has proved controversial. When European researchers argued the term was too warlike, Prof Sanders asked: ‘So why are you using the term front?’