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The week before last, on one single day, over 60 flood warnings were issued in England, 19 in Wales and two in Scotland.

In videos, you could see flood barriers built only a decade earlier

coming close to being overwhelmed.

We seem to be seeing the future,

and for us in the UK, it's looking wet.

How wet, and how well prepared are we for what's coming?

Step into the briefing room, and together we'll find out.

Let's start by finding out if we really are experiencing more floods than we used to.

Here with me is Louise Slater, Professor of Hydroclimatology at the University of Oxford.

Professor Slater, can you remind us of some of the big instances of flooding we've had recently?

In February 2020, we saw a succession of very large storms, the named storms, Kura and Dennis,

and they were bringing large amounts of water of rainfall to the UK in rapid succession over very

saturated catchments because we'd seen a lot of rainfall in the months leading up to that.

And I think this is a typical example of the types of sequences of heavy rain events that

we might see in the future, which can lead to heavy flooding.

We had thousands of properties that were flooded in February

2020. If we look at the floods that occurred at the very beginning of this year at the start of

January, we saw the river Trent in the West Midlands, which reached its record high of 3.9

meters. And I think that's quite an interesting example because we looked at how the data were

changing on the river Trent and what used to be a 50-year flood, what used to occur every 50 years on average back in the late

1950s, a level of 3.5 metres. Today, that level occurs every nine years on average. So we're

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