Hydrologist Hannah Cloke has a straightforward description of the inundation that has just struck Britain. “Our decorations may have come down but the flood warning map is currently lit up like a Christmas tree.”
And the immediate cause of this mayhem is clear. A sequence of storms this autumn and winter – Babet, Ciarán, Debi, Elin, Fergus and Gerrit – have turned Britain into “a sopping wet sponge”, as the Reading University researcher put it.
