Storm Austen, the first named storm of the season, is set to bring rain and strong winds to Ireland and the UK, while Storm Adam has left at least five people dead in Spain. Typhoon Champi is heading towards Philippine waters, Florida is housing families displaced by Hurricane Isaias and a new study charts the rise of giant heat storms.
Storm Austen, the season’s first named storm, brings wind and rain warnings to Ireland and the UK
Ireland’s weather service, Met Éireann, and the UK Met Office have named Storm Austen, the first named storm of the season, and issued warnings for heavy rain and strong winds later this week. Met Éireann said every county in Ireland would be under a yellow rain warning from 7pm on Thursday until 8am on Friday, after an earlier warning for Dublin and Wicklow, and it cautioned that downpours could cause flooding and disrupt travel and outdoor events.
The Met Office said an area of low pressure forming over the Atlantic would deepen quickly as the jet stream strengthened it, and it issued a yellow wind warning for southern England on Friday, covering much of the South West and places such as Brighton. Deputy Chief Forecaster Tom Crabtree said the precise track was still being worked out but the risk of disruption had led forecasters to name the system. Gusts above 70mph are possible on exposed coasts, with power cuts and travel delays likely.
Storm names for Britain and Ireland are agreed by a western group in which the Met Office and Met Éireann work with the Dutch weather service, KNMI, now in its eighth season of cooperation. The 2026–27 season is the twelfth run of Europe’s coordinated naming programme, which usually lasts from September until the end of August, and Austen was the first name on the group’s list. Weather services in Spain, Portugal, France, Belgium and Luxembourg name storms separately and called their first system of the season Adam.
Storm Adam leaves at least five dead in eastern Spain as the heaviest rain eases
At least five people have died in floods caused by Storm Adam, which brought what the Spanish state weather agency, AEMET, called exceptional amounts of rain to the east of the country and the Mediterranean coast. The agency recorded 632mm of rain over 36 hours in Pego, in Alicante province, and more than 500mm in parts of southern Valencia and northern Alicante. Rescue teams used helicopters to lift people from rooftops as rivers burst their banks and cut off several towns.
Stay-at-home orders that covered about 800,000 people on Monday morning had shrunk to 87,000 residents in eight municipalities by the evening and were later lifted as red warnings were downgraded. In Oliva, about 600 people sought help at the municipal centre and 400 spent the night there. Ibiza’s main airport halted flights twice, with 27 cancellations and 16 diversions, and AEMET kept yellow and orange alerts on Tuesday for parts of Catalonia and the Balearic Islands, while southern France also faced heavy rain.
Recapping earlier warnings, AEMET named Adam on 16 October and at the weekend raised its highest red alert for the coasts of southern Valencia and northern Alicante. Spanish forecasters describe the system as a DANA, short for an isolated depression at high levels, the local term for what meteorologists call a cut-off low: a pocket of cold air that breaks away from the main upper-level flow. When such a pocket meets warm, moist air over the Mediterranean, it can set off violent thunderstorms and hours of torrential rain.
Champi is expected to regain super typhoon strength and enter Philippine waters as Rosal
The Philippine weather agency, PAGASA, said Champi weakened into a typhoon on Sunday evening but was expected to return to super typhoon strength as it moved west-northwest at 20 kilometres per hour towards the Philippine Area of Responsibility, which it was forecast to enter on Tuesday and where it would be given the local name Rosal. On Monday morning the agency placed it 1,600 kilometres east of south-eastern Luzon, with sustained winds of 175 km/h and gusts of up to 215 km/h.
PAGASA said the typhoon would probably stay over the Philippine Sea on its way towards Taiwan, possibly peaking at 205 km/h before weakening from Wednesday, so a landfall in the Philippines looked unlikely. It still expected heavy rain over the Batanes and Babuyan islands in the far north and said wind signals could be raised for northern and eastern parts of Northern Luzon and parts of Bicol, possibly up to Signal No. 3 or 4, with rough to very high seas along the coasts of Luzon.
The Japan Meteorological Agency reported that the system formed as a tropical depression near Micronesia on 11 October and named it Champi a day later. It reached one-minute sustained winds of about 220 km/h on 17 October as it neared Guam, which it passed to the south before strengthening into a Category 5 super typhoon over open water. PAGASA added that the coming northeast monsoon could be warmer than usual because a strong El Niño in the tropical Pacific is expected to become very strong.
Florida gives trailers and grants to people displaced by Hurricane Isaias
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said on Monday in Pensacola that the state had begun giving travel trailers to residents whose homes were too badly damaged by Hurricane Isaias to live in, through a partnership between the Florida Division of Emergency Management and the non-profit group Emergency RV. Nearly 300 applications had arrived by midday from Escambia, Santa Rosa, Okaloosa and Walton counties, and he handed the first two trailers to Escambia County families whose homes had been struck by falling trees.
DeSantis also announced one-off grants of $5,000 for eight deputies in Escambia and Santa Rosa counties whose own homes were damaged but who kept working, paid through the Florida Disaster Fund and Volunteer Florida with the Florida Sheriffs Association. He said the state had asked for a major disaster declaration covering public assistance in 15 counties and help for individuals in eight. Across the state line in Escambia County, Alabama, a business owner in East Brewton said about six families nearby had lost their homes.
Isaias formed in the Bay of Campeche on 6 October and became a hurricane two days later, equalling the 1905 record for the latest first hurricane of an Atlantic season. It peaked as a Category 3 storm and made landfall near Destin, Florida, at 01:30 UTC on 10 October with sustained winds of about 165 km/h, the first hurricane to strike the United States since Milton in 2024. It weakened quickly once inland and lost its tropical characteristics later that day as it moved north.
Analysis finds giant heat storms now cover parts of the planet almost without pause
Supersized heat waves have grown from rare events into an almost permanent feature of the planet, according to an analysis published on Tuesday of hourly temperatures since 1960 for more than a million grid squares, based on data from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts. Its authors define any heat wave that covers at least 1% of the globe at its peak as a heat storm, and found that such storms averaged about five a year in the 1960s but about 102 a year this decade.
The analysis found that at least one heat storm has been active somewhere on Earth every day since 6 July 2008, a run of 6,681 days, and that the largest on record lasted 367 days in 2023 and 2024 and reached almost 85% of the globe. James Renwick, a professor at Victoria University of Wellington, described heat storms as a major disruption to global civilisation, while Anthony Leiserowitz of Yale University said naming them could help people understand what is happening.
There is no single agreed definition of a heat wave: the US National Weather Service uses two or more days of unusually hot weather, while weather agencies in Australia, France, Spain and the UK use three days. The World Meteorological Organization has reported that heat waves continued to intensify in 2024, with record temperatures in Europe, North America and China, and scientists say they have become more frequent and intense over land almost everywhere since the 1950s because of climate change.