The weather is the last truly wild thing on Earth.
We can't predict it and we can't control it.
I'm Donal Maclntyre, and I'm going to journey around the world
to seek out the wildest weather there is.
In this series, I'm going to experience the fastest winds on Earth.
136 miles an hour.
The awesome cycle of water around the planet.
I've been for... I can't talk!
I'm going to take a ride into the cold heart of winter.
An adventure, I agree, but it gives you a once-in-a-lifetime view
of the top of the wo-o-o-rld!
I'll experience the dark side of summer.
There's 1.5 million volts hitting my finger right now.
I'm going to get blasted...
roasted...
soaked and frozen
because I want to understand how weather works,
the awesome forces that drive it...
and how it affects us all.
I'll meet those who survived the worst it gets
and try to understand why the weather is changing...
and what that means for the future.
It's going to be the ride of a lifetime.
This is... "Wild Weather"!
Our Earth is vast - 24,500 miles around -
but all our weather takes place within this thin blue streak.
And it's through that thin blue streak that I'm about to go,
to the very top of the weather.
Donal hi.
Are you ready for this?
Even in a jet, it takes a day to circle the earth,
but I can fly through the weather in just a few minutes if I go straight up.
D316 Bravo. Pilot Two cleared for take-off.
Right around here, about a mile or so up, is where the rain clouds start.
This is where it all comes from.
For the next few miles, all those billions of gallons float in the clouds
waiting to turn into rain.
But thankfully they don't go on for ever.
So if you want a bit of sunshine, all you do is this.
For every mile we climb, the air cools by 17 degrees Celsius.
From here, at about five miles, you can look down on a thunderstorm,
look into the eye of a hurricane,
or even hitch a ride with the jet stream, the fastest wind on Earth.
And this is it - six and a half miles up.
The weather stops here.
Up this high, the air stops cooling
and remains a constant minus 50 degrees Celsius.
All the moisture in the air has dried out.
This freezing layer of dry air is called the tropopause.
It acts as a lid, trapping all our weather below.
Way above, you enter the stratosphere, an almost completely weather-free zone.
And beyond it, space.
It's amazing to think that below me is every kind of weather imaginable.
We'll start the series by taking a journey with the winds.
In the next hour, I'm going to experience everything
from a breeze to the fury of a tornado.
In just a few heart-stopping moments,
I'm going to be back down there to see how it all begins.
Take it away, Barry!
Wooh!
Having shot to the top of the weather, I thought I'd take the easy way down.
Below me is the equator and the start of my journey with wind.
And this... is where it all begins.
This is where the wind is actually born.
It's hot - damned hot.
And what's really strange is there's no wind.
And that's because this... is the doldrums.
So how is it that there are no winds where the winds are born?
The doldrums are basically a narrow strip of complete calm,
five to ten degrees either side of the equator.
The intense energy of the sun heats the air,
which rises in huge columns,
sucking in powerful surface winds from north and south.
The only movement of air is up,
so the areas underneath remain calm and windless.
This rising air is the first movement of a massive global wind cycle
which will take it right across the world.
To follow the start of the wind's journey, follow this.
Down here at sea level, my leaf drifts lazily
until it is lifted up by the rising warm air.
Way above, a huge pattern emerges.
The world's winds are locked into an endless cycle.
If you could see it, it would look something like this.
Warm air rises from the equator and hits the tropopause.
It then slides north and south before sinking back down to Earth
and returning to the equator as the winds we feel on land or sea.
This process then repeats itself
in a further two enormous wind cycles both north and south.
These six wind cells constantly try to balance the temperature
between the freezing poles and the sweltering equator.
Think of it as the earth's air conditioning system.
If it didn't exist, the poles would be 25 degrees colder
and the equator would be 14 degrees hotter.
And all this from a place of dead calm.
In the days of sail, being adrift in the doldrums was every sailor's nightmare.
Water on board was limited.
When that was gone, so were your chances of survival.
Stuck here alone with just my book
is how countless sailors must have found themselves.
We came across a calm so endless that we saw no end in it - except death.
That's how one sailor remembered it.
Nowadays, it's hard to imagine the torture of waiting for the wind sailors endured.
But of course, if you survived long enough, the winds would come again.
That's because the doldrums follow the seasons.
As summertime moves from the northern to the southern hemisphere,
the areas of intense heat that create the doldrums moves south,
dragging them with it.
Then the winds created by that huge global system eventually return.
I can feel that breeze now. Let's get outta here!
Every wind on Earth begins its cycle here.
To see what they can do, I'm off to experience all I can of this invisible force,
from the fury of a tornado to the terrifying gales of the Pacific Ocean;
from the icy blasts of an Arctic morning
and the cooling breeze of a summer day.
To get an idea of what to expect, I have to go underground.
Wind is measured by the force it exerts on an object.
Today, that object is going to be me.
This place can produce wind speeds in excess of 200 miles an hour.
It's funnel-shaped, so the wind speed increases as the air gets squeezed.
Up there, where I will stand, the wind is seven times faster than down here.
So it's a great place to feel the full force of it.
The speed of wind is measured using the Beaufort scale.
This is Force 2- about six to ten miles an hour.
It feels like the gentle breeze of a summer's day.
But at 25 to 30 miles per hour,
things are picking up.
This is Force 6,
a strong breeze where big trees sway
and you have to fight your umbrellas.
At 40 miles an hour - Force 8- it's getting tough to stand up.
A few miles an hour more and there'll be slight damage to your house.
Tree branches are already breaking.
But once you hit Force 9,
things are getting really stormy.
50 miles an hour, a good gale,
trees and power lines down, houses damaged.
But I'm still standing, as you can see.
It's taking my full weight.
In a wind tunnel, it might look like fun,
but in nature, winds of this speed are deadly,
and we call them hurricanes.
The people of Dade County, Florida, know about living through a hurricane.
In 1992, Hurricane Andrew changed their lives for ever.
A devastation, a tragedy like this coming into an area
just shakes up people's lives for years and years to come.
The nightmare began on Friday August 14.
Like all hurricanes, Andrew began life off the coast of Africa
in the warm waters of the tropical Atlantic.
Hot humid air rose up to create several thunderstorms
around an area of low pressure.
Because of the earth's rotation,
the storms rushed into the low pressure area in an anti-clockwise direction,
like water down a plughole.
This spun them all into one enormous system
which was driven across the ocean by powerful winds.
4,000 miles away in the United States,
the swirling mass of thunderstorms had already been spotted.
They'd not yet formed a hurricane, but they were seen as a potential killer
and were being closely monitored by hurricane experts.
One of them, Stanley Goldenberg, had flown through many hurricanes,
but this time his experience was going to be very different.
I was asked to fly Hurricane Andrew
and would have loved to go and fly
but I said, "My wife's expecting, no. " We didn't dream what would happen.
Andrew continued to build.
Like all tropical storms, it was fuelled by heat.
Warm water vapour in the cloud is attracted to minute particles like salt or pollen,
causing the water vapour to condense.
This process, changing from a gas to a liquid, releases heat
and in a storm the size of Andrew, the result is vast billowing updraughts
which suck in more moisture from the sea's surface,
creating more rain and heat, driving the wind speed higher and higher.
By Thursday morning, as the energy within the storm grew,
the wind speeds accelerated to over 75 miles per hour.
Andrew was now officially a hurricane.
On Friday, the hurricane watchers saw Andrew weaken
and turn away from Florida.
We thought it would move out to sea.
The Miami Herald said, 'Andrew moves out to sea. " Don't we wishl
By Saturday morning, Andrew was gaining strength.
The eye of the hurricane hit the Bahamas
with wind speeds of up to 122 miles per hour.
Florida lay just ten hours ahead.
Andrew was now 100 miles across.
The outer edges were already lashing the Florida coast.
Having spent years studying hurricanes from the safety of his desk,
a bizarre twist of fate
meant Stanley, his family and new baby were about to become victims of Andrew.
This is our house calmly waiting for Hurricane Andrew.
Trapped at home, he hoped the eye of the hurricane would pass to the north.
I was in denial. "This isn't happening. "
I was dealing with a new baby and with a hurricanel
If you can see, it's the beginnings of Andrew.
This is just one little squall.
We have much more to go.
Sunday 23rd August.
We're going to weather it out.
- "Hi, Daniell" - "Hil"
Boy, did you hear that?
I don't know if a video will pick up anything out there, but it's coming.
People talk about a tornado as sounding like a freight train or plane going by.
This was like that but seemed to get louder and louder.
It is blowing out there.
I've never seen anything like it before.
We can feel our ears constantly pop.
The winds outside are at least 110 mph. Aaron, are you OK?
The highest winds in a hurricane are found around the wall of the eye,
the outer edge of the black ring.
At 4.35 on Sunday morning,
the deadly eye wall of Andrew hit Dade County at 175 miles an hour,
destroying the radar that produced these images.
People asked did I hear the roof rip off.
Something hit the kitchen or living room wall and it fell on us.
Things pressed down on us in a tiny space.
The water level was rising.
Things were getting louder and noisier and we thought we were going to die.
When the roof gave and we were in the most terrifying situation
during the worst part of the storm,
we were pinned under the wall right there.
It fell on top of us and pinned us there.
The kids crying, us crying, thanking God that we were all safe.
Hallelujah...
Hallelujah.
It shakes me when I see the film.
I think, "These poor guys don't know what's gonna happen. "
A few blocks away from Stanley's house,
a neighbourhood of pre-fab houses sat on the edge of the eye of the storm.
The lightweight structures had no chance.
This is the worst.
This is a trailer park "at about 13"7"th and 152nd. "
There's many trailer parks in this area.
This is another typical street.
Everything total rubble.
For some people, the worst wind they've experienced is a strong thunderstorm.
They've seen 50-mile-an-hour gusts where power lines or trees go down.
Well the force of Andrew was almost 15 to 20 times that kind of force.
Hurricane Andrew terrorised the people of Florida for six hours,
and by morning, 23 people had lost their lives.
High above the coast of Florida is a wind even faster than a hurricane.
It's one of the fastest on Earth.
It's called the jet stream -
a massive river of wind 125 miles wide
that circles the whole planet at up to 200-300 miles an hour.
To get an idea of what that feels like, it's back to the wind tunnel.
This is attached to an anchor point in the ceiling.
This is to make sure that if the wind takes you off your feet, you'll be OK.
It's a record attempt. No one's stood the speed of a jet stream here before.
Lucky me (!)
We'll aim for the speed of the jet stream. We can do it.
If it's too dangerous, obviously still do it!
- If it's too dangerous... - Y"ou're a braver man than mel"
The jet stream wind we'll try to reproduce down here
was first discovered through an ingenious act of war.
The story begins in Oregon in 1945 during the Second World War.
A party of schoolchildren found a strange object.
As they played with it, it exploded, killing them all.
Similar objects were also found along the west coast of the USA and Canada.
Closer inspection showed they were Japanese bombs,
carried by huge paper balloons.
Canadian bomb disposal expert Bert Day got a close-up look.
This is one quarter of the chandelier
that hung below the big paper bag that held up all the bombs.
It's so hard to believe - complicated as hell but it worked pretty well.
(NEWSREEL) This is one of the Japanese paper balloons,
identified by the code name 'paper".
Blown by the winds, the bombs could land anywhere.
The military became worried about the panic that might develop
if the public knew they were Japanese.
To cover it up, we blamed it on the Royal Canadian Air Force.
We said that they were flying by and the damn thing fell out of the plane.
"Those stupid bastardsl" We blamed it on them and got away with it.
The mystery was how the balloons were getting from Japan to the USA.
A balloon that size could only travel for four or five hundred miles,
and Japan was over four-and-a-half thousand miles away.
The Japanese had already discovered a fast-flowing stream of wind
after flying across the Pacific towards the USA
in just half the time it took them to get back.
Not until after the war would the true nature of this wind be revealed.
The Japanese had devised a cheap and effective way of bombing the USA
by harnessing their knowledge - a brilliant idea.
Launched from three sites in Japan,
an ingenious system of weights, altimeters and timers
carried the balloons up to 50,000 feet
until they entered what we now call the jet stream.
Caught in the flow, they were whisked across the Pacific
and timed to drop onto the USA and Canada.
Down they'd come and - whammol - they'd be in the trees or wherever,
with the damn bombs hanging on them.
The Japanese discovery of the jet stream
meant America was defenceless against this ingenious airborne attack.
There was nothing we could do.
It was quite a design.
Pretty smart. The Japs were sharp.
Despite the huge distance, over 1,000 balloon bombs reached North America,
but in the end only six people were ever killed.
Today, the jet streams are used for much more benign reasons -
if you can ever find one.
For world record-holding balloonists Brian Jones and Bertrand Picard,
finding the jet stream became a matter of life and death.
Starting in Switzerland, the plan was to be the first balloon
to circumnavigate the earth.
They hoped to do it by flying within the jet streams.
In a balloon, we can't see the jet stream or know where it is,
so we have to use meteorologists.
We had two meteorologists working full time
doing something like 10,000 calculations every day
just to try and track the jet stream.
There are actually five jet streams at between six and nine miles up.
They mark the boundaries between the wind cells.
Low pressure air rises from the equator
and meets high pressure air from the poles.
Where they converge, a spinning unpredictable tube of air is created.
It's the free ride that the jet stream provides
that made Jones and Picard so desperate to find the right one.
It was just incredible watching the speed build up.
I remember thinking, "I have no idea who's flying this balloon,
"but please carry on, you're doing a grand job. " It was that feeling.
That's what the jet stream did for us.
We'd gone around the world, crossed the Pacific, with just the Atlantic to go.
And this is where it all began to go wrong.
After 14 days, they'd travelled nearly three-quarters of the way around the world
before the jet stream suddenly abandoned them.
It suddenly disappeared.
It's like the fingers on a hand.
It fragments.
We had to drop down really low and get out of this
and simply wait for the next jet stream to form.
All the pundits thought we'd never cross the Atlantic, and so did we.
Faced with the threat of ditching in freezing, hostile seas,
five days from the nearest help, the outlook appeared bleak.
It's horribly slow - only 21 knots at the moment.
We're right out in the middle of nowhere and not going very fast.
Five agonising days passed.
This was no longer a race for a world record.
It was a desperate bid to stay alive.
And then, the jet stream reappeared.
But to get back into it meant climbing higher and using precious fuel.
The balloon was getting lighter - we'd thrown out stuff to make us lighter -
we were able to push and push to get as high as we possibly could.
When we got to that altitude in the core of the jet stream,
"suddenly we weren't doing" 7"0 miles" an hour, it was 120, 130 and building.
And we shot across the Atlantic in the core of this jet stream wind.
We just looked at each other and thought, "This is just fantasticl"
There was no question of us not making the finishing line. And we didl
We've done itl
From take-off to touchdown in North Africa,
around the world in just 21 days.
I'm now ready for my own record-breaking attempt -
the speed of the jet stream.
The tunnel can do it. The question is, can I?
No one has withstood much more than 100 miles per hour in here.
Not yet, anyway.
Off!
Enough! Enough!
Nowhere near the speed of a jet stream.
But the guys tell me I'm the first to withstand even this.
I wouldn't recommend it, though!
I feel as though I've been massaged by 100 sumo wrestlers!
Oh, dear! An avalanche of wind just piercing your whole body.
The movement of your hands sends your body
all the way over here.
In the real world, it's nothing like this.
No safety lines, no controlled environment. It's a nightmare.
This was just the equivalent of an average hurricane or small tornado.
Without protection, I can't imagine what it'd be like. Incomprehensible.
136 is tough,
but Chad Urwin has been within six inches of a 300-miles-per-hour wind
and survived...
when this tornado went over his head.
That's double the speed I've just tried.
Nature's winds are always savagely unpredictable.
We were watching the news and heard about the tornado coming out of the south-west.
It came from that direction, about a mile and a half wide.
Y"ou could see the tornado" sitting on the top of the hill.
It sat there for a minute then moved right.
It picked up a 26,000-square-foot church and spun it round completely.
It turned it upside down and slammed it to the ground like Tinker toys.
We came over here.
We were pelted by gravel coming at about 100 miles an hour.
My son started wavering like he was gonna be blown into the pond.
We ran this way.
We got in here. All of us got in here.
We walked on our knees until we got to the centre.
Then we rode the tornado out while we sat in here.
So how does a wind spin itself into such a concentrated killer?
The exact mechanism is still unclear.
But it seems our friend the jet stream plays a part.
Tornadoes form in huge rotating thunderstorms known as super-cells.
These can rise as much as eight miles into the sky,
and as they grow upwards they encounter the jet streams.
These fast high-level rivers of wind suck air out of the top of the storm,
causing more air to be sucked in at the bottom.
This creates turbulence within the storm
that causes the air within it to roll over itself.
The result is a horizontal spinning vortex of air.
Strong updraughts push the vortex into a tube and can force it downwards.
When it touches the earth, a twister is born.
The consequences can be lethal.
I feel sorry for the others that lost loved ones.
As I got out of the tin horn I saw a boy and his mother
trying to get into the bathroom.
I said, "Where's your mother?"
He said, "The tornado just sucked her out of my hand. "
She didn't make it. She died that night.
After the storm, evidence emerged that vehicles and even people
had been sucked up into the tornado and carried vast distances.
Chad was one of the few survivors to witness the results.
A van and a pick-up came here from Verdon, Oklahoma, 55 miles away.
The guy who was supposedly dropped in this pond came from 30 miles away.
The tornado that ripped through Chad's neighbourhood is rare,
known as an F5, the most powerful on the Fujita scale.
It contained the fastest winds ever recorded -
a staggering 318 miles an hour.
At these speeds, wind can rip the tarmac from a road.
The force on the ground is the same as the shockwave from a nuclear bomb.
My wife said, "How's the house?" I said, "What house?"
She said, "Don't joke. " I said, "I'm not. "
I said, 'Johnson's house isn't here, our house isn't here.
"Nothing, there isn't nothing out here. "
It breaks your heart to find a piece of something that belonged to you.
I walk on the hill when it rains to look for things that belonged to me.
Every once in a while I get lucky and find something.
The little town of Bridge Creek, south of Oklahoma City, was worst affected.
In just 15 minutes, the twister had devastated the community,
and in the hours that followed, survivors struggled to the school gym,
one of the few remaining buildings.
What have we got here?
Their injuries were horrific.
The twister had thrown tons of metal, wood and glass into the air
with the power of a machine gun.
The survivors bore all the hallmarks.
Even mud and flecks of dirt had been driven at such high speeds
that they'd been forced deep into the skin.
In an area of less than two square miles, ten of their neighbours had been killed.
The next day, the damage became clear.
The Bridge Creek tornado had mown a vast strip 20 miles long
through the town and surrounding hills.
In all, 65 tornadoes hit the Oklahoma region that day.
42 people died and nearly 3,500 homes were destroyed in just 11 hours.
There were several people killed by that tornado.
People like the Darnells that lived here on the hill.
Kelly Cox lost her mother up there.
The Underwoods lived over the hill here.
Those people will always haunt me.
I hope I never go through anything like that again.
Once is enough.
When a powerful wind hits an object on land, it unleashes some of its energy -
a house pulverised or a forest laid flat.
But when the wind hits the water, the transfer of energy can be awesome.
Wind creates friction on any surface.
But the largest on the planet is the ocean which covers over 70% of it.
So it's no surprise to find the friction between wind and water
has amazing results.
Hawaii is the best place to test the enormous energy
generated by the friction between the two.
The folks here are world experts at harnessing it in any way they can.
With just a few metres of nylon and a 20-mile-an-hour breeze,
the power of the wind can be turned to a maximum-strength adrenaline buzz.
Champion kite surfer Marigold Zoll
claims she can get me airborne in a single afternoon.
It can't be that difficult - it's only a kite, after all.
If you double the wind speed, you get four times the force.
So add another few miles an hour to the wind speed against my kite now
and in theory there'd be enough power to lift the average family car.
However, it seems today that's not going to work for me.
So we're getting a bigger kite?
- Y"eah. " - I'm heavy and we need some air.
- That's the real reason, isn't it? - "That's right. "
Bit of a ballerina about me out there.
- Very smooth. - Y"ou were on your toes. "
Am I a bit too smug for a beginner?
We'll see how you do on the board.
Just as wind pushes against my kite, it also pushes against the water.
The result is waves.
But getting onto them is not as easy as it looks.
A few tiddly Hawaiian waves can eat you in and spit you out,
so imagine what the whoppers can do.
When you think of the chaotic way that waves are born,
it's a wonder there's any order to them.
In fact, every ocean has its own unique wave rhythm.
You can tell the size of an ocean
by the number of times a wave breaks in a single minute.
Here in Hawaii, you get about seven crashing ashore every 60 seconds.
And over here, 10,500 miles to the east,
on the far shore of the Atlantic, on the Irish coast, you get...
eight waves a minute.
But if I go back there 5,000 miles...
over to the smaller Gulf of Mexico, you count many more waves per minute.
Nine... ten... eleven.
There are 12 per minute - that's five more than in Hawaii.
That's because the Atlantic and the Pacific
are far bigger oceans than the Gulf of Mexico.
The bigger the ocean, the more time and space for the wind to act upon it.
The longer the wind blows on a wave, the larger it becomes
and the more distant from other waves.
So in really big oceans, you get bigger waves and fewer of them -
about seven every minute on the Pacific coast,
compared to 12 on the smaller Gulf of Mexico.
If there's no wind, there's no waves.
The erratic nature of the wind stabbing at the surface creates waves.
The further across the sea the wind blows,
the bigger the wave it creates.
Wind and water are in constant contact,
each bringing friction against each other.
This friction literally whips up the ocean,
sculpting water into its most beautiful form.
But elsewhere in the world, a powerful wind can turn waves into monsters.
A big storm on one side of an ocean
can push big rollers thousands of miles onto beaches on the other side.
But if a massive storm travels across the ocean, its waves can be deadly.
So what happens when the winds blow up a real tempest at sea?
The answer is a lot closer to home.
Having travelled across the Atlantic to Ireland,
I'm about to see what happens when the wind and the waves combine
with the power of the jet stream and the intensity of a hurricane.
Few people have witnessed it, let alone lived through it.
Below me is the Fastnet race, where the best yachtsmen pit their wits
against the roughest seas in the world.
This is the Fastnet Rock, off the southern tip of Ireland.
It's one of the most westerly points in Europe,
so it's the first place to feel the full force of the Atlantic storms.
Some of the really big ones come from the USA,
carried here by powerful transatlantic Westerlies.
Given the right conditions, these storms can whip the seas around us
into terrifying walls of water,
which have even reached over the top of the lighthouse.
In the summer of 1979, just a few miles from where I'm standing,
a storm of almost unprecedented ferocity set in,
a storm so powerful that it was unlike any other recorded in these waters.
It spelt disaster for the few yachtsmen and women caught up in it.
They're not like breaking waves on a beach which are lovely to watch.
They're like monsters, they rumble.
As they charge down the face of the wave, they build and build.
They're huge - they just engulf you. And they did.
At the heart of that terrible storm remains a mystery -
a mystery that hints at a freak weather phenomenon.
The start couldn't have been in better conditions. Perfect.
Good visibility, light breeze.
It was the dream start to the race we'd looked forward to all year.
In 1979, Matt Sheahan was 17 years old
and working as crew on his father's boat in the Fastnet race.
The 600-mile course round the legendary lighthouse
is the perfect place to stretch the world's best to their limits.
But 1979 was different.
A hot summer's day in North America,
a freak weather phenomenon over the Atlantic
and a lighthouse off the coast of Ireland
were to play a part in the closest thing sailors have come to hell.
"An event like the '"7"9 Fastnet" leaves you in no doubt whatsoever
as to just how powerful the weather can be.
A small change is enough to turn a situation you think is under control -
that you'd planned for, may be apprehensive about,
but you're under control - into complete chaos.
On August 10th, 4,000 miles away to the west,
"Low Y", as the storm would come to be known,
was beginning to form in the skies of the Northern Great Plains of the USA.
Hot summer air mixed with cold air from the north.
Nothing unusual - these storms are normally harmless
and burn themselves out in a day or so.
At the same time, on this side of the Atlantic,
the Fastnet competitors were worried that there wouldn't be enough wind.
Far above the little storm in America,
the jet stream swung slightly south
and began to blow over the top of the storm, accelerating the wind speeds.
The whole system was then pushed east across the Atlantic Ocean,
gaining strength and speed with every hour.
News that Low Y was on the way reached the yachts later that night.
We were pretty well organised and battened down and ready to face it.
Low Y was expected to head straight for France, away from the Fastnet,
but at the last minute it turned and headed north towards the rock.
On the evening of August 13th, the storm slammed into the race.
What happened then, as things developed,
was that it did get very uncomfortable.
The chaotic fury of the storm caused rapid changes in wind direction,
which created towering waves that battered the boats from all sides,
making them almost uncontrollable.
Matt and the other experienced sailors were shocked and confused.
The crests of waves would break way above you
and you could just hear this rumbling
and you'd look around thinking, "Where on earth is this coming from?"
To your horror, you'd see it coming down towards the boat.
That was certainly one of the most frightening things about the ordeal -
not knowing where these breaking waves were coming from.
That's because at the heart of the storm
a highly unusual event was taking place.
When all the weather records were analysed,
they revealed the presence of a unique phenomenon -
a freak event where a tongue of cold dry air
from high in the stratosphere, a "surface jet",
forced itself down into the heart of the storm.
The effect was like turbo charging.
It split a normal storm into several systems,
each with the strength of a hurricane.
Early next morning, Mayday calls were jamming the emergency radio frequency.
Reports were coming in thick and fast of 50-foot waves like blocks of flats
and 70-mile-an-hour winds.
The one that caused the biggest problem
came rumbling down, hit us and turned us upside down again.
But this time the boat didn't come upright.
This time it remained upside down.
As I was held down in the water,
I just felt cross and disappointed.
Disappointed because there were so many things I wanted to do.
While Matt was under water fighting for his life,
his father, David, had also been swept overboard.
What I remember next was standing up and seeing what I least wanted to see.
I don't know why, but I knew straight away it was my father,
lying face down in the water, just drifting away.
That was the last I ever saw of him.
As we flew back, looking out of the window, it was a scene of chaos.
Some people were firing distress flares, desperate to be picked up.
I think that was the first time that it really struck me
how serious the whole scene had been.
Tragically, Low Y was responsible for 15 deaths in the Fastnet race.
Some were washed overboard, others died trapped in their vessels.
But many more died in life rafts that proved woefully inadequate
for such awful conditions.
Friends of mine who were in the storm
and people I've met since then who have sailed round the world,
all of them say they had never seen anything like the conditions they saw
in this small area in the Irish Sea.
This was wind and waves at their wildest.
They defeated the best sailors in the world.
But there is a wind that creates the biggest waves in the solar system.
It's the fastest wind of them all.
Here, on one of Hawaii's highest mountains, is the place to see it.
But at a speed of four million miles per hour, you need specialist kit...
because this wind comes from space.
It's called the solar wind,
and when it arrives it creates the most spectacular show on Earth.
93 million miles away, the sun erupts,
spewing a barrage of charged particles out into space.
At its fastest, a solar wind travels about four million miles an hour,
but because it has so few particles in it, it wouldn't even ruffle your hair.
As I speak, billions of charged particles are passing through us all
and by now they're already way out in space.
Although we can't see or feel the solar wind,
we can see its presence in one of nature's most fantastic displays of light,
65 miles above our heads.
The Aurora - the northern and southern lights.
You're looking at billions of electrons -
charged particles in the solar wind
that hit the atmosphere and excite the gases within it,
creating the ultimate space rainbow.
As the solar wind washes over the earth's magnetic field,
the charged particles within are drawn down over the polar regions.
When they hit the atmosphere, the Aurora is created.
It's the same mechanism that's making the picture you're watching right now.
The Earth's magnetic force guides the particles
in the same way your TV tube guides these images onto the screen.
But does the solar wind affect our weather?
Yes, but no one knows exactly how.
It certainly seems to affect the ferocity of polar storms.
Some believe all those particles from the sun
crash into the troposphere, creating more clouds and fuelling more storms.
While scientists cannot agree on exactly how solar winds do this,
they realise that the forces that drive our weather
do not stop at the boundary between Earth and space.
Back on Earth, this frozen landscape marks the end of my journey.
The winds I followed from the equator
have taken about 14 days to enter the last of the big wind cells.
It's been quite a ride!
Here in the frozen north, the wind's journey to the poles finally ends.
In just two weeks,
our journey, which began in the hot stillness of the doldrums,
has brought us everything from storms at sea
to the terrifying power of a hurricane.
After carrying all this violence, it comes to rest here,
sinking gently back towards Earth.
Now all this cold air begins to slip south
and the cycle starts all over again.
This enormous cycle of the winds has brought every kind of weather
to every corner of the earth.
As it churns endlessly through the atmosphere,
it shapes our world and changes our lives.
In the next programme, I'm going to take a ride with water,
the fuel of the weather.
Driven by the winds, water can bring life and death.
I'll be following water's journey around the planet
from the oceans to the clouds,
from a storm to a flood,
to experience the awesome power it can unleash.