Professor Adam Schaife (pictured) warned minister of the approaching weather bomb a month before
A Met Office forecaster stockpiled provisions and warned ministers about the Beast from the East a month ago.
Professor Adam Schaife, head of long-range forecasting at the Met Office, alerted the Cabinet Office to the incoming weather bomb four weeks ago.
He told them that they should expect Britain to be battered by a deep freeze.
In preparation for the polar vortex he stocked up on essentials.
‘I got extra oil, food and logs in, knowing this was coming,’ he said last week.
A Lidl supermarket on Dudley Road, Birmingham, was emptied of goods last night.
Shoppers panic bought goods, clearing the store of meat, vegetables and frozen good.
Almost nothing was left on the shelves as people stocked up on essentials and prepared for increasingly bad weather.
Deliveries attempting to reach the store became stuck as snow caused chaos on roads across the UK.
Shoppers cleared shelves across the country as people prepared for the worst
This Lidl, on Dudley road in Birmingham, almost entirely sold out of meat, fish and vegetables
Delivers vehicles attempting to restock the store were caught in traffic caused by deadly patches of ice and poor visibility
The Lidl frozen section was left with just a few items still in stock
Despite the warning from experts at the Met Office, ministers failed to act.
Earlier this week National Grid revealed that the UK was on the brink of running out of gas, as intense demand caused by plunging temperatures outstripped supply.
The utility company, which operates the gas pipeline network, issued a ‘gas deficit warning’ as the nation ramped up the thermostats.
It was forced to ask suppliers to provide more gas as demand for the fuel hit a six year high.
Forecasts suggested the UK is facing a 48 million cubic metres shortfall. The country uses around 70billion cubic metres of gas a year – an average of 198 million cubic metres a day.
It raised fears that factories would be forced to close up and down the country, but National Grid insisted businesses had protocols in place to use less gas if supplies run low.
And households will only be asked to use less as a last resort, if these measures do not work.
Ministers have faced criticism for failing to prepare for the effects of the Beast from the East and Storm Emma
National Grid revealed earlier this week that the UK was facing a critical gas shortage as homeowners turned up the heating in their homes
Prof Schaife’s team spotted the massive storm system, which was later dubbed the Beast from the East, growing near India and the Pacific Ocean.
The heaving mass moved east, spreading outwards and warming the stratosphere, 20 miles above the North Pole, by 50 degrees celsius in two days, bringing icy winds and heavy snow to swathes of Europe.
He also revealed that a similar weather pattern had caused the glacial freezes of February 2009 and 2013.
‘We recognised the pattern because we’d seen it before,’ he said.
He added the Met Office’s modelling had improved allowing it to detect extreme winter patterns much earlier.
Schaife also revealed it was harder to predict extreme summer weather patterns that might cause drought or flooding.
But he did say his team were working on that.