In the photo: A flooded road after the passage of Hurricane Ernesto, in Toa Baja, Puerto Rico.
The "remnants" of Hurricane Ernesto will hit parts of the UK this week, bringing up to 150mm of rain and wind gusts of up to 100km/h, the Met Office has warned.
Ernesto ripped through the North Atlantic this week with 100 mph winds, leaving hundreds of thousands of people in Puerto Rico and Bermuda without power. The Met Office has issued a series of weather warnings for heavy rain across the UK next week. A low-pressure weather system imbued with the residual energy of Ernesto - the fifth named storm and third hurricane of the Atlantic hurricane season - is making landfall in Britain.
While Ernesto has already weakened to a tropical storm and remains on the western side of the Atlantic, it will dry up further as it moves further inland into cooler waters and is absorbed by a more typical weather front moving towards Britain.
Met Office meteorologist Craig Snell said that "because tropical systems just have so much heat and so much moisture in them, the remnants of the heat and the remnants of moisture will still be there in this weather system on Wednesday and Thursday (August 21 and 22 ), so it will increase the rainfall.”
"The newspaper headlines suggesting that Ernesto himself is ready to defeat Britain are not accurate. The once-powerful system itself will break up before it reaches us, but the heat and moisture it once contained will be swept away by a mid-latitude frontal weather system. This will lead to unsettled conditions for the UK, particularly in the north and west, with heavy rain and strong winds expected here," Deputy Chief Meteorologist Tony Wesson said.
While August is usually associated with nice and stable weather, wet and windy fronts like this are not uncommon, Wesson explained.
Forecasters have issued two yellow weather warnings for rain in Scotland, with up to 150mm expected to fall over some hills and 75 to 100mm more widely within 24 hours. Some parts of the Highlands typically receive less than 100mm of rain throughout August. The warnings cover much of Dumfries and Galloway from 2 pm on August 19 until just before midnight and all of western Scotland north of Glasgow and Stirling for most of August 21 and 22.
The rain will be accompanied by a strong southwesterly wind, with gusts up to 50-60 km/h possible along the coast and around the islands. The Met Office warned of possible public transport delays, spray and flooding on roads, as well as potential power outages and flooding in homes and businesses.
There is a small chance that the spring tide will generate large waves that could cause injuries and endanger life in coastal areas, the weather service added. | BGNES
