Storm Henk

By Paul Homewood

Storm Henk brought the usual lot of apocalyptic headlines:

But let’s examine the data rather than than the hype.

First of all, winds.

As many in the media have done, the Mirror lazily labelled 94 mph winds “pummelling” the UK, even though that those winds only occurred on the Needles. Once again, the Met Office stand accused of deliberately and deceitfully misleading the public, by continuing to include this totally unsuitable site in its press releases:

Elsewhere winds were no stronger than many other storms which hit Britain every winter.

In Orpington, for instance, where the tree fell on that woman, average winds were only 27 mph:

As for rainfall, the highest daily total was 39.8mm in Hampshire. The worst affected area appears to have been the Southwest and Midlands.

According to the England & Wales Precipitation Series, 23mm fell in the Southwest on the 1st, and a further 17mm on the 2nd. In the Midlands, the numbers were 13mm and 18mm. None of these daily totals were in any way unusual, as KNMI show:

https://climexp.knmi.nl/selectdailyindex.cgi?id=someone@somewhere

Of course, two successive days have a cumulative effect, but many storms linger for more than just one day. Rainfall totals for the 3rd, by the way, were negligible.

To be fair, the ground everywhere was very wet, following a wet December. But that had not been an unusually wet month, with 145 mm. The December rainfall data also gives the lie to ITV’s claim that it is all to do with climate change:

Henk is the eighth named storm to have hit the country this winter and the pattern is likely to continue due to the effects of climate change.

"This is climate change and the impacts we are seeing," Mr Paggett added. "We are seeing these increasingly wet and blustery winters. We are seeing storm upon storm which is exacerbating the issues."

Quite what relevance the “eighth named storm” has to do with anything is a mystery. Even the Met Office has warned against reading any significance into these numbers, because the way they name them has changed over the years.

And the data shows that we often get Decembers as wet as last month:

Latest footage shows the usual flooded fields and swollen rivers, which we commonly see most winters. The EA estimate 1000 properties flooded, but again this is a small number in overall terms of the numbers affected each year.