Danger To Life Warning Issued As Storm Dennis Brings 'Weather Bomb'

Storm Ciara came along to balls-up last weekend, and now we have her b*****d brother Dennis here to ruin this one too.

The Met Office has raised the threat level, issuing an Amber 'danger to life' warning, with heavy rain and strong winds expected across the majority of the UK.

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To make matters worse, Dennis is bringing a 'weather bomb' with him, which sounds ominous.

Explaining what we can expect from this weather bomb, Met Office meteorologist Simon Partridge told LADbible: "A weather bomb, which actually unbelievably is a meteorological term, is a low pressure system which deepens more than 24 millibars in 24 hours. So it's basically an area of low pressure that deepens very quickly, and that's a weather bomb.

"Storm Dennis has deepened by more than 24 millibars in 24 hours, so it certainly ticks the box for that one."

According to the Met Office, low pressure systems often lead to unsettled weather conditions and rainfall.

Simon continued: "It will probably reach its lowest pressure by late tonight, so through this evening and overnight, where it could get as low as a 1,020 millibars, which will make it one of the lowest low pressure systems ever recorded in the North Atlantic - it is a very, very deep low pressure system.

"The actual centre of the low will be closer to Iceland than it is to the UK, but it's such a large and deep low pressure system that it will still have that strong effect on the UK.

"Hopefully we're far enough away that the winds won't be quite so significant as what we saw last week, but we will still see 50 to 60mph gusts of wind quite widely across the UK. Locally, particularly around the western coast we could see up to 70mph gusts."

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But while the threat of our fence panels blowing away is a very real one, it is the amount of rain which is the biggest worry, and there is a high risk of flooding in some areas.

In Calderdale, West Yorkshire, the Army is helping prepare defences, as areas such as this are expected to be hit with a month's worth of rainfall for the second weekend in a row.

Simon said: "The main concern for us on this one is the amount of rainfall, particularly coming off the back of Storm Ciara last week, because we saw flooding from Ciara last week, so there are a lot of areas of the UK that are already very sensitive to any further rain.

"Some parts of the UK, particularly Wales and northwest England, could see another 100 to 120 millimetres of rain - which is more than a month's worth of rain this weekend, after seeing more than a month's worth of rain last weekend as well.

"So these areas haven't really had chance to recover and those rivers will react very fast over the course of the weekend to additional rainfall, so flooding could be more of a serious effect of Dennis than what we saw last week."

Happy weekend everyone.

Topics: Weather, UK News

Jake Massey

Jake Massey is a journalist at LADbible. He graduated from Newcastle University, where he learnt a bit about media and a lot about living without heating. After spending a few years in Australia and New Zealand, Jake secured a role at an obscure radio station in Norwich, inadvertently becoming a real-life Alan Partridge in the process. From there, Jake became a reporter at the Eastern Daily Press. Jake enjoys playing football, listening to music and writing about himself in the third person.

@jakesmassey