Development & Analysis Of A UK Storm Indicator (part 3)

Today I compare my home-baked storm index with Met Office named storm data

With a nice little story coming out of the data I thought we might like to compare my freshly baked storm index with the named storm data collated by the Met Office. You can rummage through their data for yourself by visiting this page.

Before we begin with this exercise we need to realise one rather important point and that is my indicator has yielded a mere 51 storm months in 123 years, which yields a mean incidence rate of 0.41 storm months per year, whereas the Met Office have chalked-up a mean rate of 7.38 storms per year for the period 2015 – 2023. That is a hell of a difference but, of course, we are not counting the same thing by a long chalk! I could say we’re looking at chalk and cheese, but that may elicit too many groans. On the one hand I’m trying to count the windiest and wettest whole months, whereas the Met Office are trying to count individual low pressure zones that might cause disruption once they get to the mainland. Nevertheless, let us throw caution to the wind (…