Category: Yorkshire
& N.Midlands
Date: 12.09.2005
Printable version
Â鶹Éç weatherman Paul Hudson has turned TV reporter to tell the story of two Yorkshire stormchasers.
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Paul teamed up with Sarah Norris and Caroline Bain - postgraduate students at Leeds University - who spend their weekends tracking thunder and lightning and capturing it on camera.
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Tonight (Monday 12 September at 7.30pm on Â鶹Éç ONE) their footage of the once-in-a-lifetime storm that devastated villages around Helmsley this June will be screened on the Â鶹Éç's Inside Out progamme.
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The footage is thought to be the only film of the storm itself and shows hailstones the size of a 50 pence piece pounding the area around the Chopgate, followed by torrential rain.
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Seventy centimetres - a month's average rainfall - came down in an hour.
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Sarah had to seek shelter moments after capturing the scenes, when her car broke down and streams overflowed. She was led to safety by villagers across a narrow bridge over floodwaters that reached 12ft deep.
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Hudson says: "It's remarkable to see the actual weather that led to such terrible damage. Although there was a lot of footage of the aftermath, to see pictures of hailstones that big is astonishing."
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The Look North weatherman took Sarah and Caroline back to Hawnby, where some of the worst flooding took place. He later helped them chase the storm which brought chaos to this summer's Glastonbury Festival by using the Met Office supercomputer and information from several satellites.
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Sarah, aged 22, first became interested in stormchasing when she was ten. She escaped unhurt when lightning hit her home and has remained fascinated by extreme weather since then.
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She and Caroline both hold degrees in meteorology and are now doing postgraduate studies at Leeds University.
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Notes to Editors
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Please credit Â鶹Éç Inside Out if any of the transcript above is used.
