British Weather Disasters

Environmental impact of natural disasters & phenomena.

Here is a popular book with big set-piece descriptions accompanied by illustrations at its core, but with enough science to attract both the specialist reader and to educate the lay reader without scaring them off. Disaster books traditionally feed on hype, sensationalism and bad science. Eden redresses the balance. What then is the place of weather disasters in our climate? Are they freaks or a necessary part of the whole? How rare are meteorological event does it take to cause chaos in our day-to-day lives? Are we becoming more at risk and less capable of dealing with them? Or do we just complain more? These days we try and mitigate the effects of different hazards, by acquiring personal and property protection - individually, personally and politically. So what is the role of local and central government, the insurance industry, the media and the public? And how do we actually measure disaster? By rarity, insurance cost, death toll, recovery times or what? Can we merge all these so we can compare -say- the 1976 drought with the 1891 blizzard? Can we rank disasters? 15,000 died in the European heatwave of August 2003. Is this the shape of things to come? What will happen if the Gulf Stream/North Atlantic Drift stops flowing? Here are just a few of Philip Eden's topics in a book which will be riveting to readers.

Environmental Hazards in the British Isles (1981) offers a comprehensive account of the various hazards affecting Britain. Based on a wealth of empirical data, it provides a balanced perspective on phenomena that are usually presented in a sensational way by the media and then quickly forgotten. A three-fold methodology is suggested for the study of environmental hazards, which concentrates on their incidence, their causes and their frequency, and their impact on both the individual and society as a whole.

In the two decades bracketing the turn of the millennium, large-scale weather disasters have been inevitably constructed as media events. As such, they challenge the meaning of concepts such as identity and citizenship for both locally affected populations and widespread spectator communities. This timely collection pinpoints the features of an often overlooked yet rapidly expanding category of global media and analyzes both its forms and functions. Specifically, contributors argue that the intense promotion and consumption of 'extreme weather' events takes up the slack for the public conversations society is not having about the environment, and the feeling of powerlessness that accompanies the realization that anthropogenic climate change has now reached a point of no return. Incorporating a range of case studies of extreme weather mediation in India, the UK, Germany, Sweden, the US, and Japan, and exploring recent and ongoing disasters such as Superstorm Sandy, the Fukushima nuclear crisis, flooding in Germany, and heat waves in the UK, Extreme Weather and Global Media generates valuable inquiry into the representational and social characteristics of the new culture of extreme weather.

"In this Very Short Introduction Storm Dunlop explains what weather is, what causes it, and how we measure it. Analysing the basic features of the atmosphere, its major wind systems and ocean currents, he shows how these drive the weather we experience."--Book cover.

This book is about weather extremes in the United Kingdom. It presents fascinating and detailed insights into tornadoes (supercell and non-supercell tornadoes, historical and contemporary case studies, frequency and spatial distributions, and unique data on extreme events); thunderstorms (epic event analysis and observing); hailstorms (intensity, distributions and frequency of high magnitude events); lightning (lightning as a hazard, impacts and injuries); ball lightning (definitions, impacts and case studies); flooding (historical and contemporary analysis, extreme rainfall and flash flooding); snowfalls (heavy snowfall days and events). It also looks at researching weather extremes, provides guidance on performing post-storm site investigations and details what is involved in severe weather forecasting. It is written by members, directors and past and present Heads of the research group the Tornado and Storm Research Organisation (TORRO). With fifteen chapters thematically arranged, and data appendix including a new tornado map of the U.K., this book presents a wealth of information on meteorological extremes. This volume is aimed primarily at researchers in the field of meteorology and climatology, but will also be of interest to advanced undergraduate students taking relevant courses in this area.