The Met Office must have been tempting fate when it began naming storms. Since then the country has had to endure a run of stormy weather, and so far nine storms have been powerful enough to earn a name.
But has the new system been worth all the hype, or has it just been a storm in a teacup? The Met Office would argue that the move has garnered lots of media attention and alerted everyone to the dangers of the storms, and so is well worth the effort.
The problem, though, is that storms are only named if they are likely to have strong enough winds; heavy rains don’t count. That can lead to absurd situations when a storm drops torrents of rain, triggering devastating floods, but its winds are too weak to warrant it being named.
That happened in late January, when the remnants of the storm that brought epic snowfalls to north-east America swept across the Atlantic and battered parts of Cumbria and Scotland with flooding rains, in places trying to recover from floods earlier this winter. The Met Office declined to give this beast a name, although the media dubbed it Storm Jonas, the unofficial name given in the US.
It’s all a little confusing. This winter’s floods have caused a good deal more damage than the winds – storms Desmond, Eva and Frank in December are estimated to have caused about £1.3bn of damage, largely from flooding, not winds. And a storm with no name could actually be lulling us into a false sense of security – if it doesn’t have a name it can’t be that bad, can it?
