A powerful winter storm across the pond is the cause of the UK’s wet spell (Picture: George Cracknell Wright/LNP)

The reason Brits are reaching for their raincoats and umbrellas more and more at the moment is the bomb cyclone in the US.

Tomorrow Scotland will be drenched by heavy rainfall for 15 hours from 3am, with the Met Office issuing a yellow warning for Edinburgh, Glasgow and Stirling.

Meteorologist Simon Patridge said the wet and windy weather is down to the bomb cyclone across the pond.

He said: ‘The UK weather is going to remain unsettled with further spells of wet and windy weather due to the strengthening of the jet stream because of the weather in the US.’

More than 70 people have been killed as the intense winter storm sweeps across the US, bringing dangerous blizzards, winds and frigid conditions.

But Patridge stressed that the UK weather being impacted by the tail of the cyclone bomb is no cause for concern.

‘The effect it’s having on the UK is nowhere near as dramatic because that system has brought up a lot of cold air farther south, across the US,’ he said.

The bomb cyclone has intensified the North Atlantic jet stream (Picture: PA)

Usually, a bomb cyclone in the US wouldn’t impact the UK weather, but this one has intensified the North Atlantic jet stream.

The let stream is a core of strong winds that blow from west to east around five to seven miles above the Earth’s surface.

‘What effect (the bomb cyclone) has had is to strengthen the jet stream because the jet stream is basically driven by temperature differences,’ Partridge added.

‘So the starker the difference in temperature between the northern edge of it and southern edge, the stronger the jet stream becomes.’

Today is forecast to be colder than yesterday, with patches of sunshine and heavy showers in northern Scotland and western England.

Thursday will also have a ‘cooler feeling day’ and be ‘still rather windy and with showers’ across the UK, Patridge said.

Expect things to be unsettled tomorrow to Sunday, with snow dusting the HIghlands, showers and rain in southern England and fog and frost overnight.

The snow-filled cold snap earlier this month has given way to more drizzly weather (Picture: PA)

Partridge added: ‘So the general sort of knock-on effect of the weather in the US is that in general, the UK is going to be a little bit milder than it would normally be at this time of year.’

A bomb cyclone is a not exceedingly rare yet very powerful winter storm.

The collision of one warm and one cold air mass can whip up severe winds twisted by the Earth’s rotation.

But if the atmospheric pressure during this drops too suddenly in the colder air mass, the change in pressure between the two makes the winds even stronger – this is called bombogenesis.

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Expect it to be drizzly for a fair few days, the Met Office says.