The blame for yesterday’s severe gale rests on a very vigorous jet stream, reaching about 220mph a few miles in the atmosphere.

This high-speed river of wind has brought much of this winter’s wet and also mild weather as it has powered almost straight across the Atlantic. Like a conveyor belt, the jet stream has dragged along strings of Atlantic depressions that also swept in mild air, hence this month’s high temperatures, which are about 4C (7.2F) above normal.

What was different about yesterday’s storm was the southerly track of the jet stream through Britain. For much of the winter it has been driving between Iceland and Scotland, but recently a pool of cold polar air slipped off Greenland and pushed the jet stream farther south.

The good news is that the great speed of the jet stream also pushed the gales into the North Sea, leaving Britain relatively calm by the evening as the winds died down.

This storm was the most powerful to hit England since the Burns Night storm of January 25, 1990, when winds gusted to 104mph, at Aberporth in West Wales, and 47 people were killed — the largest death toll from a storm in Britain since 1953.

Yet the country escaped the worst of the storm. It is thought that a phenomenon called a “sting jet” developed in the storm as it left British shores and hit Denmark, the Netherlands and Germany with greater winds and far worse damage. The sting jet is caused by cold air high above the stormclouds rushing down to earth like an avalanche and bursting across the ground with ferocious wind speeds — this was the cause of much of the destruction in the October 1987 storm.

However, the outlook is for colder air to follow this weekend, as northerly winds flood down from the Arctic, bringing the threat of snow. This will be followed by much calmer conditions as high pressure builds up, and forecasters are expecting quite a cold spell next week.

How long this cold will last for is not certain, but it fits the Met Office’s long-range forecast for this winter, which predicted a cold end to the winter as a weak El Niño in the Pacific affects weather in northwestern Europe.

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