The threat from Storm Babet was hard to predict because it was the wrong sort of rain. “Most of our rain comes from the west. This was rain coming from the other way,” Thérèse Coffey, the environment secretary, told the Commons environment committee. “We don’t have quite as much experience on that.”
True, our rain does often come from the west but blaming the wind for the disastrous flooding from Babet was something of a red herring because the Met Office and Environment Agency had warned of heavy rain much earlier.
Coffey also appeared to be confused about forthcoming tides. “At the end of this week we’ve got the spring tides — which doesn’t feel right because we’re in autumn — but anyway we’ve got tides coming in,” she explained to the committee of MPs.
However, spring tides don’t relate to the season, they refer to the “springing forth of the tide” around the time of the new and full moon, when there is the greatest difference between high and low tides owing to the combined gravitational pull of the sun and the moon.
But Storm Babet was a timely reminder of the wettest October on record in the UK 120 years ago (Weather Eye, October 23). Of course, the deluges of October 1903 came long before man-made climate change became a big issue, and some commentators have suggested this is proof Storm Babet also had no connection to climate change.
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But if the storms of 120 years ago happened today, the consequences would be more rain and strong winds, something we know thanks to volunteers transcribing old handwritten weather records into a modern format that were reanalysed in computer weather models. These models clearly show that such severe storms would drop even more rain now than if they had occurred a century ago, and that is climate change in action. “When it rains, it rains more’, explained Ed Hawkins at the University of Reading. “A warmer atmosphere holds more water, so rainfall intensity increases.”