Image source, PA Media

Ferry operators have been cancelling services amid a rare red weather warning and now a city sightseeing cruise firm has cancelled all 75 of its operations today due to the storm.

P&O Ferries suspended its Dover-Calais sailings until further notice earlier - and Irish Ferries and Stena Line have cancelled all departures from Pembrokeshire and Fishguard.

Stena has also cancelled or delayed ferries departing from Holyhead.

In Devon, the Dartmouth Higher Ferry suspended crossings and the Sandbanks Ferry between Poole and Studland in Dorset has been cancelled.

Now City Cruises UK has cancelled all of its trips scheduled for today in locations including London, Poole and York.

Managing director Kyle Haughton said all customers affected would be offered refunds.

The RNLI in Minehead, Somerset, is warning people to stay out of the sea as the coast is battered by high winds.

A spokesperson said: "Despite the prevailing weather I have seen people surfing at Minehead this morning. I really need to get a warning out against anyone doing this.

"They are not only putting their lives at risk, they are potentially jeopardising the lives of those who will be called out to rescue them if things go wrong."

Image source, PA Media

Andrew Segal
BBC South West

More than 25,000 homes in Cornwall and 27,000 in Devon are currently without power, utilities bosses have confirmed.

In Cornwall, Western Power Distribution, external said engineers were working to restore supplies to all properties, including affected areas in Lostwithiel and Marazion.

Other parts of the county have seen slight power surges, with households reporting flickering lights in the Penzance area.

Western Power Distribution tweeted, external that it had teams "in place and ready to go".

It added: "We have doubled the number of staff available to take calls from storm-affected customers."

Image source, Traffic Wales

A lorry has overturned on the M4, blocking two lanes of the motorway.

Traffic Wales reported the incident westbound on the motorway between junction 37 at Pyle and junction 38.

Weather conditions like these are "terrifying" for lorry drivers, Rhys Williams from the Road Haulage Association says: "This sort of wind tests the HGV drivers to the limit," he tells the BBC.

He advises other drivers to take greater care than usual when passing high-sided vehicles.

Image source, Getty Images

A Dorset school meals firm is looking to donate food to charities as schools have been shut.

Forerunner Personal Catering is calling on organisations to come forward.

The Bournemouth-based company has said it has been left with "thousands" of fish fingers and samosas as well as chicken, jacket potatoes and vegetables, as schools have been closed due to Storm Eunice.

Those interested can contact the firm.

All outpatient appointments for patients of the Royal Cornwall Hospitals NHS Trust have been cancelled on Friday "to keep people safe during the storm", bosses have said.

The trust said "someone will call" to rearrange those appointments.

"We are sorry to cancel and for any inconvenience this will cause, but we need to keep people safe.

Image source, Getty Images

The Humber Bridge, which links Yorkshire and Lincolnshire, will close to all vehicles and pedestrians from 13:30 GMT due to Storm Eunice.

It's thought to be only the fourth time the suspension bridge has closed due to weather in its 40-year history.

The bridge is likely to be closed for several hours, its operators said, and drivers face a diversion of about 60 miles.

Image source, Darragh McDonough

While Northern Ireland has largely escaped the worst of Storm Eunice so far, that's not the case in the Irish Republic.

The south of the country has been struck by winds as high as 80mph, while northern counties such as Donegal have seen heavy snow.

There are currently 73,000 homes and businesses without power in the Republic, ESB Networks have said, with the majority of those outages in counties Cork, Kerry and Clare.

However, the Status Red wind warning for those three counties has now been lifted.

Image source, Getty Images

Sting jets are the "sting in the tail" of a storm - a small area of very intense winds, often 100mph or more.

These narrow systems - often about 30 miles across - sometimes form in the UK's powerful weather systems, and only last 3-4 hours.

So could a sting jet make Storm Eunice worse?

BBC Weather meteorologist Simon King says sting jets are very difficult to predict because of their relative small scale.

We can sometimes spot the formation of a sting jet in the satellite image, he says, but at the moment it’s uncertain whether this is happening with Eunice.

There was a sting jet in the Great Storm of 1987 but at the time meteorologists weren't really aware of this phenomena.

And in 2013, the St Jude's storm - which recorded gusts of 99mph and left more than 270,000 homes without power - also contained a sting jet.

Hazel Shearing
Education correspondent

There's no one picture that sums up what's going on with schools in the UK today.

Pupils are likely to be in one of three camps: they're in school despite Storm Eunice, they're at home because their school has closed, or it's the half-term holidays - so there were no plans for them to go in anyway.

Some schools also had inset days planned.

One Twitter user wrote this morning: "So frustrating our school decided to wait till 7:50am after most staff are in to tell us due to Storm Eunice we can go home and do our inset training on Teams from there."

Another questioned why his brother's school was closed when the storm "has so far amounted to a breezy morning" where he was.

Meanwhile, some teenagers on social media whose holidays officially start next week have been celebrating an extra day off.

After nearly two years of disrupted learning during the pandemic, though, schools are well used to gearing up for remote learning - and other pupils have tweeted that they've been given online work to do while classrooms are closed.

Image source, PA Media

Passengers on easyJet flight EJU8014 from Bordeaux to London Gatwick this morning endured two aborted landings before their plane was put in a holding pattern over the south coast and then forced to return to the French city.

It touched down back at its starting point more than three hours after it departed.

The airline told passengers: "We're very sorry that your flight has now been diverted back to Bordeaux.

"This is due to poor weather conditions in London Gatwick, which are below safe operating limits."

We've just heard that a gust of 110mph (177km/h) has been reported at The Needles on the Isle of Wight as the storm continues its journey east.

Andrew Plant
BBC News

I'm in Sharpness where the Bristol Channel comes off of the sea and goes into a much narrower passage towards Gloucestershire. That's where those flood warnings are in place and that's where the flooding problems could potentially be.

It does flood fairly often. We have a high spring tide here this morning. When you couple that with the extra wind, then you get those real possibilities of flooding. Lots of people in Gloucester on Thursday had police knocking on their door, giving out leaflets telling them to be prepared and not to go out of their homes during the storms.

But there are some places that are particularly liable to flooding up there and those people were told that they should leave their homes and not come back.

Image source, Reuters

Train passengers are urged to avoid travelling today as rail operators impose emergency 50mph speed limits in many parts of the UK.

No trains will operate in Wales for the entire day - Great Western Railway services from London Paddington are terminating at Bristol Parkway instead of continuing to Swansea.

Among the firms advising against travel are Avanti West Coast, CrossCountry, Great Northern, London North Eastern Railway, Southern and Thameslink.

Roads are also proving treacherous, with several bridges closed, including the M48 Severn Bridge which links southern England and Wales, and the Britannia Bridge, which connects the island of Anglesey with mainland Wales.

At Heathrow Airport, at least 65 flights - departures and arrivals - have been cancelled and a further 114 were delayed by more than 15 minutes, according to aviation data provider FlightStats by Cirium.

At Gatwick there have been 15 cancellations and 67 delayed flights.

EasyJet said it has cancelled a "small number of flights" from UK airports today.

British Airways said the rate of aircraft permitted to land at Heathrow "is being reduced due to gale force winds".

The airport wrote on Twitter: "High winds and poor weather may cause last-minute delays, but we will do everything in our power to minimise any disruption that results."

Ferry operator P&O Ferries suspended its Dover-Calais sailings "until further notice" - and several ferry services due to sail across the Irish Sea were cancelled.

In Dorset, the Sandbanks Ferry between Poole and Studland has been suspended.

Transport for London urged people to avoid non-essential journeys in the capital. It said extra staff were poised to respond quickly to any incidents.

Andrew Segal
BBC South West

Image source, Neil Smith

A lifeboat station and a swimming pool in Cornwall are among properties which have been damaged by the storm.

The RNLI said the roof from its Sennen station in west Cornwall had come off and the lifeboat crew was at the scene trying to help make the area safe.

It added that a power line has come down and debris has been "flying around".

In Bude, part of the roof has come off the town's leisure centre.

Fire crews have been at the scene.

Bude has also seen one large tree fall in the town centre.

Image source, Tom Cox

Tomos Morgan
BBC News

When we arrived on the seafront this morning at 6am, it was windy, but having lived in south Wales all my life, stormy seas in Porthcawl are commonplace.

But within an hour of the red warning coming into place at 7am, there was high tide.

Waves began crashing against the sea defences, spilling over the prom, but still we have seen this before.

Nearing 8am, however, the wind really took off.

It may have looked dramatic, but it was a struggle at time to walk and stand straight such was the power of the winds.

We were able to take shelter under the canopies and walls of Café Piccolo in-between our live hits, and were at the safer end of the promenade – away from the larger crashing waves towards to the old lighthouse where the live shot from the RNLI shows the most dramatic events of the storm., external

A few hours in, and the wind is only now beginning to reach its peak as Storm Eunice embraces south Wales.

Andrew Segal
BBC South West

Trees have been reported coming down across various parts of Cornwall, taking down power lines and damaging property and vehicles.

Image source, Wadebridge Community Fire Station

Image source, Rob Jordan