Storm Eunice cut a huge swathe of destruction as her hurricane-force wind gusts tore through Hampshire and the Isle of Wight.

Eunice was the most powerful North Atlantic Ocean spawned low-pressure system to hit both counties this century.

However, it must be stressed that last Friday’s deadly storm cannot currently be directly linked to climate change.

This is because meteorologists and climate researchers’ are still looking into similar weather events like Storm Eunice. But what is absolutely certain, is the North Atlantic Ocean is and has been the perfect breeding ground for dangerous low pressure systems to form and develop in winter for centuries. And fuelled by the jet stream - a ribbon of extremely strong winds high up in the atmosphere - along with a strong polar vortex and possibly a jet sting (very intense winds above 100mph within the depression ) this is what happened with Storm Eunice as her barometric pressure deepened extremely rapidly as she made tracks towards the British Isles unleashing violent and damaging winds on our patch and elsewhere in the UK and Ireland. Officials at the Met Office issued a rare red (danger to life) warning for some central-southern England counties including Hampshire and the Island for the first time in the national weather service’s history. In fact, the highest known recorded wind gust logged across England last Friday was 122mph at the extremely exposed Needles Lighthouse on the western side of the Isle of Wight and this has provisionally smashed all previous wind gust speed measurements across the country. But it must be noted this data is being disputed because Met Office statistics show that an ever higher gust of 134mph was documented in January 1968 on the Great Dun Fell in Cumbria.

Inland Hampshire experienced some sustained gusts too. At my Mottisfont-based weather station, I recorded a 73mph gust and the nearby Met Office’s Middle Wallop weather station logged a similar reading. Other weather stations in north Hampshire recorded higher values. Prior to Storm Eunice, the most deadly one was the Great Storm on October 16 1987 which claimed 18 lives and felled an estimated 15 million trees across a huge area from the Midlands and East Anglia in the north, southwards to the central-southern England coastline along with the Southeast.

That storm was wrongly dubbed a hurricane at the time and it developed over the Bay of Biscay and then sped rapidly northeast across England’s southeastern quadrant before exiting into the North Sea.