The Met Office explains what happens when a 'weather bomb' occurs.
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00:00So just what is a weather bomb?
00:03Well, actually, first and foremost, it's quite simply an area of low pressure,
00:07but we see those all the time.
00:08So what makes certain low pressure systems that much more special?
00:11Well, to be a weather bomb, it has to be really intensifying,
00:15really deepening, and that deepening process has to happen rapidly,
00:19so much so that we need to see a drop in the central pressure by 24 millibars
00:25in 24 hours for it to qualify as a weather bomb.
00:28Now, Doris is a prime example of such a phenomenon.
00:32At midday on Wednesday, just an area of cloud, really,
00:35the storm just forming well out in the Atlantic.
00:37The central pressure, 1,004 millibars.
00:40But what happened with Doris?
00:42Well, we need to look high up in the atmosphere towards the jet stream,
00:46a powerful jet digging down.
00:47And where we've got this little kink in the jet stream,
00:50well, that became an area where Doris really intensified,
00:53running through the sequence.
00:54Look at the satellite picture now.
00:56Just look at that low pressure system really forming.
00:58And then as the storm approached the UK,
01:00the isobars just popping out of the center
01:03as Doris really continued to intensify, so that by midday on Thursday,
01:07the storm was down to 974 millibars, a drop of 30 millibars in 24 hours.
01:13That's what creates the number of isobars,
01:15and it's those tightly packed isobars that
01:17drive the strong and damaging winds that we've been seeing.