Hurricane Lorenzo is on its way to the UK, where it is expected to hit overnight on Thursday and into Friday morning, bringing gale force winds, heavy rain and huge waves.

Lorenzo has reached Portugal’s Azores islands, with hurricane force winds ripping up trees and hundreds of firefighters on alert.

A live tracker on Windy.com shows the storm swirling above the mid-Atlantic island chains, on a path towards the Britain.

Carlos Neves, the president of the Azores’ civil protection authority, said the islands began to feel the impact of the hurricane – which is currently creating 100mph winds – at around 6am.

A warning has gone out to surfers not to go into the ocean as Lorenzo was likely to cause life-threatening surf and rip current conditions for the next 48 hours, authorities said.

Lorenzo briefly became a Category 5 hurricane at the weekend, the strongest on record this far north and east in the Atlantic.

The hurricane is likely to hit the UK on Thursday night before sweeping across the country on Friday morning.

By the time it barrels through it will have become an ex-tropical storm, unlikely to have the wind speed or power that it currently holds.

But it will still have an impact on the already weather beaten British Isles.

Met office forecaster Aiden McGivern said: ‘By Thursday, Lorenzo will end up close to the UK, by now transformed into a typical Autumn area of low pressure.

‘But it will bring with it some heavy rainfall and potentially high seas, some significant swell associated with Lorenzo as it arrives on Thursday night and into Friday.’

He added: ‘The remnants of ex-hurricane – as it will be by then – Lorenzo is likely to bring some wet and windy weather into Northern Ireland and western Scotland on Thursday.

‘By the start of Friday that wind and rain will be sweeping across the rest of England and Wales, especially southern parts of the country.’

He warned of a ‘risk of gales, risk of heavy rainfall on top of already saturated ground and risk of those big waves around coastal areas’.

The Met Office has also warned of plummeting temperatures on Thursday with the potential for a grass frost in some northern areas.

Britain has already taken a battering this week with downpours and thunderstorms causing flash flooding in many areas overnight.

At 10pm last night, there were 31 flood warnings and 150 flood alerts in force.

Some residents were left trapped in their homes on the Isle of Man as the rain lashed down.

Thunderstorms swept across London, the south of England, Wales and the Midlands on Tuesday, with some areas hit by a week’s rain in just an hour.

Over the 12 hours from 8am on Tuesday, the Met Office said Pennerley in Shropshire had the highest rainfall total with 36.2mm – 25.6mm of which fell within one hour.

Some flights from Heathrow Airport were delayed due to the bad weather.

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