The 'Michael Fish' weather blunder and the 1987 Great Storm

Michael Fish is the patron saint of ruined weekends. In 1987, he famously told the British public not to worry about a hurricane, right before the sky essentially fell on our heads. It remains the ultimate "oops" moment in meteorological history.

The culprit was a "weather bomb." A mass of warm subtropical air slammed into freezing polar winds, causing the atmospheric pressure to drop like a lead weight. This sudden vacuum sucked in surrounding air with such violence it flattened fifteen million trees across the country.

It is proof that the atmosphere doesn't care about your forecast or your pride. Sometimes, the physics just decides to ruin everyone's Tuesday.

Wait, how does a 'weather bomb' actually explode without any gunpowder?

It’s not a literal TNT explosion, though the insurance claims certainly looked like it. In our world, we call it "explosive cyclogenesis," which is just a fancy way of saying the atmosphere had a sudden, violent panic attack.

Imagine the air pressure is like a stack of weights holding everything steady. For a storm to become a "bomb," that pressure has to plummet faster than a lead balloon—specifically, 24 millibars in 24 hours. It’s like the floor suddenly vanishing from under the air.

When the pressure drops that fast, the surrounding air rushes in to fill the vacuum at terrifying speeds. It’s basically nature’s version of a giant, angry vacuum cleaner being switched to 'turbo' mode because two air masses couldn't get along.

What's the actual "fight" like when these two air masses collide?

It’s less of a polite handshake and more of a high-speed crash. Warm tropical air meets cold polar air. They don't mix like milk in tea; they violently shove each other aside.

The Jet Stream—a ribbon of high-altitude wind—acts as an exhaust fan above them, sucking air upwards. This creates the "hole" in the atmosphere that causes the pressure to plummet.

Because the Earth rotates, this collision turns into a spinning vortex. It feeds on that temperature clash until your garden fence is in the next county.

How does a wind miles above our heads actually manage to flatten my fence?

It’s not reaching down to push; it’s pulling from the top. Imagine the Jet Stream is a high-speed conveyor belt miles up that suddenly starts acting like a massive industrial extractor fan.

When it removes air from the upper levels, it creates a hollow space. To fill that void, the air down on the ground—where we live—has to lunge sideways toward the center of the storm.

That desperate, horizontal scramble is what we feel as wind. The harder the top pulls, the faster the bottom rushes, and suddenly your garden shed is flying toward the next zip code.

Could the air just tumble down from space to fill that gap instead?

Physics is rarely that helpful. We live in the troposphere, which is essentially a giant, invisible Tupperware box. The top of this box—the tropopause—acts like a lid that keeps our weather trapped inside.

The air above that lid is far too thin and lethargic to come to the rescue. Since the void can't be filled from the top, the atmosphere is forced to pull from the sides. It becomes a horizontal stampede of air molecules.

Everyone on the ground level starts rushing toward the center of the storm at once. It’s a desperate, sideways sprint to fill the void, and unfortunately, your garden furniture is just an obstacle in the middle of the race track.