Hey everyone and welcome back to the Understandable English Podcast. I hope that you are having a great day. So today I would like to talk about storms and storms, particularly in the UK. So what is a storm, you might ask? The official definition. So the dictionary definition is a violent disturbance of the atmosphere with strong winds and usually rain, Thunder, lightning or snow.
So essentially it is extreme weather and usually with wind or rain and here in the UK we have quite a few storms in the winter time. Well, not every year, but it seems like increasingly we have had more and more storms and in the UK back in 20/15/16, the Met Office, so the government body that looks at weather, so looking at weather warnings and extreme weather, they started to name storms. So for bigger storms they would call them a name like Oliver for
example. And when they name storms, they start with each letter of the alphabet always starting at A. So for example Storm Alex and then Storm Ben, B for Ben, Storm Charlie, C for Charlie and and so on I think you understand. And this year, so since August in the last sort of year, we have had at least one named storm every month in the UK. That is a lot. And in December we had three named storms. And this year there has already been three named storms in January, which is crazy.
And those storms have been called Henk, Isha and Jocelyn. Jocelyn is the latest storm in the UK. So you might wonder, how bad are these storms? Well Isha, which was a storm that happened about one week ago, now killed two people. Two people sadly died related to the storm, Which for for such for a country with 68 million people is not an incredibly extreme event, but it was felt and affected everywhere across the UK.
This storm brought strong winds of up to almost 80 mile per hour across the UK and lots of damage was done to people's houses, cars, gardens and many people were also injured by objects flying through the air with the strong winds because the UK is an island or Great Britain is an island.
And then there's the island of Ireland, Northern Ireland, which is still part of the UK. There is a lot of coastline and as a result, strong waves from these winds, these big waves of water hitting the coast during the stormy weather and it can be a little bit scary. So Storm Isha last week hit the UK and I will tell you sort of my experience of this storm during the day. We were by the seaside and it wasn't super stormy, but we looked out at the ocean and the
waves were very strong. So we kind of knew, yeah, there's a storm coming, and usually you can see it in the ocean first. So the waves arriving to the shore before the storm arrives to the land. We drove home and I took a small sleep in the afternoon, probably around 5:00 in the early evening. When I woke up at 6:00 PM, I heard very strong wind. It almost sounded like someone screaming or whistling like whoo Hoo outside it was very light and everything was shaking.
The lights were flickering so the lights were going on and off, on and off, on and off very fast. Now this was a small effect of the storm from the the heavy wind, but what did happen was lots of the plants in our garden were blown all over the place and even some of the things in the garden were broken or damaged. But I can't complain because everyone was safe and we had no serious problems. But I would not have wanted to
go outside during the storm. It would have been very difficult to walk in that weather and actually it can be quite dangerous to drive a car in that weather because there is a risk of trees falling. And this is actually what caused a few people to die. Two people in the UK, they crashed into fallen trees. Especially in the dark, windy weather, it is hard to see when a tree has fallen on small
country roads. So I really hope that almost all of the storms for this season have finished because it feels like there have been so, so many. Even after Storm Isha, which I just talked about, there was another storm directly afterwards called Storm Jocelyn and that means that this year we have had 10 storms across the autumn and winter months since ju since August. That is crazy. And to to put in context, last season, so last year from 2022 to 23 we only had two storms,
two. And now we've had ten. That is crazy. And the last time we had 10 or more storms was 2015 with 11 storms. I really hope that next year will be a better year for weather. So what do you think about storms? Do you have any extreme weather where you are from? I hope that you've enjoyed this episode and I might do another episode about different types of weather, maybe extreme weather at some point in the future. In general, the weather in the UK is quite calm if you even
think. One year ago we had only two storms, so don't be scared about coming to the UK and visiting even in the winter or autumn months. But if I had to recommend, I would say visit the UK in summertime. You will get better weather of course, and the country is not too hot anyway. Even in the summertime we get normal temperatures of around 20° and nothing crazy and you won't get those crazy annoying
storms. So I hope that wherever you are listening to this that you're safe, happy and healthy and I wish you the best for the rest of your day. I hope to see you in the next episode of this podcast. Goodbye.