The FINANCIAL — The UK and parts of Europe saw the most severe sequence of storms since 1990 in December 2013 and into the New Year, with wind gust in excess of 90mph, extensive flooding, power outages and widespread disruption over the holiday season as storm after storm moved in from the Atlantic, according to Lloyd's, the world's specialist insurance market.
The clustering of these events is a particularly significant characteristic of the recent stormy weather, explains Dr Milan Simic, managing director of AIR Worldwide. "When storms start happening there is a tendency for multiple storms to form, whether in the space of two or three days as we saw around Christmas, or within the space of several weeks. But it doesn't mean a whole season is going to be stormy."
Windstorm Christian (called St Jude in the UK) signalled an early start to the European winter storm season when it smashed into Southern Britain on 28 October 2013, causing insured losses of between EUR1.5bn and EUR2.3bn across the UK, France, Netherlands, northern Germany, Denmark, Sweden and Russia, according to AIR.
The activity continued relentlessly in December with Windstorm Xaver moving through the north of the continent on 5 and 6 December producing insured losses of around EUR800m, according to Aon Benfield's Impact Forecasting, with Scotland, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Scandinavia and Poland most affected.
The closest cluster of storms moved in over the holidays with Dirk, Erich and Felix hitting the UK and France between 23 and 27 December. While these wetter storms had less intense wind speeds than October's Christian and Xaver, they caused widespread flooding in both coastal areas (as a result of storm surge) and inland, as a result of swollen rivers and waterlogged soils.
The significant precipitation contributed to December seeing 154% of the UK historical average rainfall for that month, according to RMS. In Scotland it was the wettest December since records began in 1910.
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