Met Eireann blames media over Lorenzo

pauldry wrote: »

These Yellow Orange and Red warnings are a joke. Sure the past two nights in Donegal have been as bad as anything Lorenzo gave and there was no storm name. Then the A to Z of storm names and along comes one from a different place like Emma or Lorenzo in fact. Have we even used any of the storm names for our waters yet?

They should go back to the force 1 to 10 of the old days. I always knew how windy it was going to be when your man with the glasses and needle pointed at force 9 off the west coast. At least the forces had an index like "enough to blow branches off a tree" or "enough to break a house chimney" . See you knew what you were dealing with.

Does Orange break a chimney or is it Red. The force measurements gave you a simple 1 to 10 of likely events. Colours dont. And neither does kph. Thats for car speeds not winds.

It's the Beaufort scale, force 1 - 12 and they still use those when it's particularly strong but also use the names associated with each force (e.g. force 10 is storm force, force 12 is hurricane force). And this scale is based on the wind speed so you can't exactly do away with them.
You talk about the wind required to "blow branches off a tree" but that's very imprecise. For example, a near-gale force wind in winter probably wouldn't cause a huge amount of damage to trees as they'd be bare. The same wind speed in the middle of summer would cause significantly more damage due to the trees being in full leaf. That's the idea behind the colour coded warnings. It assesses the impact of a weather system and the effects it will cause rather than just looking at the strength of the winds (although that's also a part of it). I do think that Met Éireann should do away with the county-wide warnings though. A red warning may be warranted for west Cork while the north east of the county could be relatively unaffected.

Lorenzo was overhyped by the media. MÉ only issued a yellow warning (not unusual weather, localised danger) for the vast majority of the country, yet you had RTE with correspondents in Howth and Waterford talking about the damage from Lorenzo (of which there was almost none). They were correct to highlight that it could potentially affect the country but once the track was nailed down, they moderated their warnings. Unfortunately, the media nowadays know that people lap up sensationalism and ran with the "killstorm" angle for more clicks.

As for the storm names, storms have been named by various other European Met offices for quite a while now. However, I believe that any ex-hurricanes that affect the UK and Ireland will retain the name given to it by the NHC in the US.