WEATHER warnings are to continue into Thursday with torrential rain, flooding and 60mph gusts battering Scotland over the next few days.

Yellow "be aware" warnings have been issued by the Met Office for the Highlands and Islands, Strathclyde, Tayside, Grampian, the Lothians and central Scotland on Wednesday.

Flood alerts are also in place across swathes of the south of the country, central Scotland and parts of the West Highlands.

As mopping up operations continued across many areas of Scotland following Storm Desmond over the weekend, the Scottish Environment Protection Agency (SEPA) issued 16 flood warnings and six flood alerts on Wednesday.

It comes the UK Government confirms some of the £50million it announced to support households and businesses affected by last weekend’s devastating floods in Cumbria and Lancashire would be spent in Scotland.

The Scottish Government said it had also triggered the 'Bellwin Scheme', which offers emergency financial assistance to councils in the event of major floods, adding that it had made available of £42m for investment for flooding in next week's local authority finance settlement.

The latest bout of storms also come as scientists at Glasgow and other UK claim the recent weather is not unprecedented and cast doubts on repeated comments linking Storm Desmond to climate change.

They also claim the UK needs to be better prepared for extreme weather, calling for an urgent reconsideration of how towns and cities are built.

Yesterday in Aboyne in Aberdeenshire, around 400 homes in Aboyne were left without power after gale force winds, while the A83 at the Rest and Be Thankful, which has been closed for long periods following previous bouts of bad weather, had a lucky escape after newly installed debris protection nets caught a 1000 tonne landslide.

The Duck Bay Hotel on the shores of Loch Lomond remained cut off in the aftermath of Storm Desmond yesterday.

The hotel escaped damage following a £2.5m refit and rebuild after a major flood nine years ago and staff were able to reach the property wearing protective footwear but the roads around the venue were impassable to members of the public.

An endangered sea turtle found stranded on the Ayrshire coast during Storm Desmond on Sunday also died despite efforts to save it.

The two-foot-long loggerhead turtle was in a critical condition when it was found by dog-walkers in on the beach at Irvine but died at the Scottish Sea Life Sanctuary in Oban yesterday.

A Met Office spokesman said persistent and heavy rain would continue into early Thursday, adding: "Some very strong winds are also likely in association with this system with gusts of 60mph possible in places."

Meanwhile, the Scotland Office said the Scottish Government will receive an extra £3.94m to deal with the flood aftermath following the £50m funding announced by Chancellor George Osborne.

Secretary of State for Scotland David Mundell said: "People in Scotland who had their homes flooded in the past week will expect the Scottish Government to use this new money to help them in the same way the UK Government is helping those south of the border."

A team of experts from the Universities of Aberystwyth, Cambridge and Glasgow have concluded in a report that events such as Storm Desmond are not exceptional or unprecedented in terms of frequency or magnitude and that risk forecasts would be improved by including data dating back hundreds of years.

Dr Larissa Naylor from Glasgow University said: “These floods and the 2013/14 storms have shown us that our landscape is dynamic rather than static, where rivers reshape floodplains and erosion remodels our coastline, with large economic and social costs.

"We need to urgently consider how we plan our cities and towns, and rebuild in the wake of large flood and storm events, to live safely in our changing landscape.”