Nevertheless, now we understand what El Niño is and the consequences it can carry, how do we know when it's intensifying, and how do meteorologists and climate scientists monitor and forecast it? With a bit more meat on the bones, here is the former BBC weather forecaster, Peter Gibbs.

When things are starting to happen, you'd be looking for those easterly trade winds, and that means winds blowing from the east, to start weakening or even to reverse and start blowing from the west instead, and that's, that's an early sign that there's, there's something afoot.

And then pressure difference.

So those trade winds are actually driven by the atmospheric pressure difference across the Pacific.

So they blow normally from a region of high pressure in the east above upwelling cold water to low pressure in the west.

Now, that difference used to be measured, and still is to some extent, as, as a simple difference in pressure between two stations, Darwin in Australia and Tahiti, and that was known as the Southern Oscillation Index.

The oscillation bit coming from the fact that we go from El Niño to its opposite La Niña and then back again with, uh, some, some normal bits in between, if you like.

And what will we expect to see? How will things change for us as this unfolds?

So why should an area of the Earth's surface getting really hot stay hot? Why does the high pressure stay there, locked in over that land mass and intensify the effect like is happening now?

Because the way the weather pattern's set up at the moment, it, it is all down to the jet stream.

The jet stream sometimes goes very loopy, like a meandering river.

If you can imagine sitting in the base of one of those loops, it's almost like a, an eddy within the flow which is cut off from the rest of the atmospheric flow.

Normally, we're seeing weather systems coming in from the Atlantic, and that's what brings our more changeable weather across Europe.

It moves on.

You might get a few days of this, but then the next Atlantic system comes in and moves on.

if it is, is, is it therefore going to become more common as temperatures go up?

But first, beginning with the basics of the various forms flooding can take, including the contributions of storm surges from the sea, here's the former Met Office and BBC weather forecaster, Peter Gibbs.

They're almost always weather-driven, unless it's something like a burst water main or something like that.

But they're pretty much always due to an excess of rainfall.

But we break flooding down into three kind of broad types.

So it's fluvial, pluvial, and coastal.

So fluvial just means basically rivers spreading outside their normal boundaries.

So, you know, rivers are, are fed by catchments, big areas that collect rainfall.

Are there any tangible, tractable examples of how this is affecting everyone?