What in the name of all that is holy and pure is going on with the weather at the moment? I know it’s winter and it’s supposed to rain and stuff, but is anyone starting to feel like they’re in some kind of Biblical flood? It already feels like it's been raining forever and all the forecasts say we’ve got at least another week of downpours ahead of us. FML.
One thing is true – this weird weather isn’t in your imagination. The rain that’s engulfed southern and central England over the past few weeks is apparently the worst winter downpour in almost 250 years. The rainfall in January was greater than in any other winter month since meteorological records began in 1767 and three times the average amounts. Joy. All of this has lead to an ‘almost unparalleled’ flooding crisis and winds reaching up to 100 miles per hour. Shall we say FML, again?!
The rain that’s engulfed southern and central England over the past few weeks is apparently the worst winter downpour in almost 250 years
So WTF is actually going on? Well, weather’s a bit outside of The Debrief’s remit (unless you count constantly checking our iPhone weather app for three weeks before our next holiday) so we asked an adult who actually knows – Steven Keats – a forecaster and spokesperson for the MET office. ‘In true weather forecaster tradition, I’m going to tell you it’s all got to do with the jet stream,’ he says. In English? ‘The jet stream is a fast-moving ribbon of air, which is 30,000 feet up in the air. It basically guides weather systems towards the UK and western Europe and is essentially responsible for what happens in UK weather.’
So what has this jet stream been up to and why does it love rain so freaking much? Well, like ridiculously long-winded coffee orders and the term ‘reaching out’, this annoyance seems to have started in America. ‘At the moment in the United States, there has been a lot of very strong "thermal contrasts," with unusually cold air filtering down from the Arctic where it meets unusually warm tropical air coming up from the Caribbean and sub tropics,’ says Steven. ‘When there’s a very strong contrast like this, it helps to power up a very powerful jet stream, with low pressure formed underneath it. Which is what makes the stormy conditions that are currently being flung in the direction of us.’
Can’t they fling off anywhere else? What about Russia? They need some snow right now. ‘Well, we’ve also had a very persistent area across Scandinavia and Western Russia, which acts as a bit of a block. When the weather systems come in from the jet stream, they run up against it and can’t get any further so all of these weather systems come steaming back into the UK. All that means that we’ve had a lot of wind and rain across the UK,’ says Steven.
Back in 1813, there was a whole year where it just never got hot. In the whole of the northern hemisphere. At all
We know! But will it get better any time soon?
Well, back in 1813, there was a whole year where it just never got hot. In the whole of the northern hemisphere. At all. Crops failed. Peopled died. No one left the house. It was known as the Poverty Year, The Year There Was No Summer or Eighteen Hundred and Froze To Death.
It was caused by an unusually large amount of volcanic activity – not something we’ve experienced this year. But that jet stream could still cause the same effect.
There’s a small silver lining to this story. The wet weather that summer forced Mary Shelley, John William Polidori and their mates to stay indoors for much of their holiday in Switzerland. They decided to have a contest to see who could write the scariest story, leading Shelley to write Frankenstein and Lord Byron to write* A Fragment*, which Polidori later stole and rewrote as The Vampyre — a precursor to Dracula. Without the Summer That Never Was we would never have had Twilight or The Vampire Diaries.
So maybe weird weather can have some good consequences. Or something.
Follow Sophie on Twitter @sophcullinane
Illustration: Daniel Clarke
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.