Putting The Wind Up… (part 1)

I take a quick look at historic wind speed for UK & Ireland plus their waters in order to gain some perspective on all this named storm malarkey.

These days it’s the thing to name drop. Not celebrity or very important persons names as such, but names of storms. This year so far we’ve had storms Agnes (27 – 28 Sep), Babet (18 – 21 Oct) and Ciarán (currently underway) with Debi waiting in the wings somewhere (or should that be ‘winds’?). The Met Office never used to bother to name storms, preferring to point at a weather map and say something about it being windy/stormy (be careful out there tonight sort of thing). All that changed in 2015 when named storms became a thing.

I recall a Met Head at the time rambling on about raising people’s awareness of the weather and how dangerous/destructive it can be. That goes without saying but in the back of my mind lies a conspiratorial worm that quietly suggests that the climatological powers that be are using every opportunity to frighten the public utterly shipless. The official ramble goes like this…

The naming of storms using a single authoritative system provides a consistent message an…