Just over a day after Storm Isha started to clear, the UK is bracing for more hurricane-strength winds off the Atlantic.
Jocelyn — the 10th named storm of the season to hit the UK — will rip across the north of the country on Tuesday evening into Wednesday morning. The Met Office has issued an amber warning for the west coast of Scotland, with yellow alerts covering Wales, Northern Ireland and most of England.
While the wind and rain won’t match Isha — which unleashed chaos as it cut power to hundreds of thousands of homes in Ireland, the UK and the Netherlands — it could still bring gust of 80 miles (129 kilometers) per hour across Scotland. That could hinder efforts to reconnect customers still without electricity, while train services in Scotland have been canceled this evening.
Hurricane-Force Winds Cause Chaos, Blackouts Across Europe
“There definitely could be a lot of places that have had no time to clean up from the strong winds of its predecessor,” Jason Nicholls, a meteorologist with commercial-forecaster AccuWeather Inc, said by phone. “Anything that got weakened by the first storm will be a little more susceptible from this system.”
Global warming is not only increasing the intensity of heat waves — with 2023 the hottest year on record — but also hurricanes and typhoons as warmer water and moister air provide additional fuel for storms.
#StormJocelyn is a large Atlantic low pressure system, already affecting western parts of the UK
Weather warnings for wind and rain are out through into Wednesday ⚠️ pic.twitter.com/6R3O7Pfdg0
— Met Office (@metoffice) Jan. 23, 2024
In Scotland, which will bear the brunt of Jocelyn, there is concern that farmers are struggling to recover from the succession of storms this season, with fields already saturated.
“We’ve seen fields of crops ruined underwater with massive financial losses,” said Alasdair Macnab, vice-president of the National Farmers Union of Scotland. “Further rain combined with snowmelt as temperature rises is of huge concern.”
After freezing temperatures last week, the Atlantic storms have ushered in a period of much warmer weather across the region. London will reach 13.5C on Tuesday and Wednesday, with Paris climbing to 14C, according to Maxar Technologies Inc. Further south, Marseille will have a high of 17.5C and Madrid will hit 19C by Friday.
As Jocelyn moves east, it will impact Belgium, Denmark and Norway. There are yellow weather warnings in place for parts of northern France and the Netherlands over the next two days.
The strong winds have also caused delays to liquefied natural gas cargoes offloading at UK terminals, according to a note from local supplier SEFE Energy Ltd.
More than 10,000 customers in the UK — mainly in Northern Ireland — were still without power this morning.
While cutting off electricity to thousands of homes, the strong winds continue to dampen demand for gas and squeeze power prices. Intraday contracts turned negative in the UK in the early hours of Tuesday morning and were trading at about €1 in Germany, data on Epex Spot SE show.
Germany is on course for record wind power output on Wednesday. Production from thousands of turbines in the nation is set to peak at 57,736 megawatts at noon Berlin time, according to a Bloomberg model.
German wind output was 41,656 megawatts as of 8 a.m. in Berlin, compared with the current record of 53,022 megawatts reached just before Christmas.
Photograph: A car submerged in water after the River Eden burst its banks near Warwick Bridge in Carlisle, UK, on Jan. 22, 2024. Photo credit: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images
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