Public ‘will ignore daily weather warnings’
Chief forecaster warns of complacency as people are regularly notified of dangerous rain and wind
ISSUING weather warnings every day could lead to the public becoming complacent and ignoring them, a chief forecaster has suggested.
Liz Bentley, the chief executive at the Royal Meteorological Society, said over the past week “probably not a day has gone by without a weather warning”, adding: “There are so many of those, the concern is that people might become complacent.”
She said: “If we constantly have yellow warnings out for something people will start to ignore them.”
Parts of Scotland and large parts of England are under a yellow weather warning for rain and wind as the impacts of Storm Jocelyn are felt.
The northern and western fringes of Scotland are also under an amber warning for wind until tomorrow.
Yellow warnings are issued when there is a potential for low-level disruption from extreme weather.
Ms Bentley said it was important that the public understood whether they were likely to be impacted by the weather, and exactly what action they needed to take.
Jocelyn is the 10th named storm since September, making it the busiest season since the practice began in 2015. Two people were killed and thousands left without power at the beginning of the week as Storm Isha hit the UK.
Storms are named by the Met Office when the weather reaches the threshold to cause disruption or damage which could result in an amber or red warning.
Scotrail announced that no trains would run after 7pm until today, when it would have a chance to assess possible damage from the storm.
National Rail, which determines whether lines are closed said it has a team of meteorologists who provide “around-the-clock analysis” on how the weather may affect Scotland’s Railway and inform its decision-making during storm events.
“Having two named storms back-toback means trees weakened by Isha and now more likely to fail during Jocelyn so we are proactively managing that risk by a phased withdrawal of services before the worst of the weather arrives,” a spokesman said.
Ms Bentley said naming storms was an effective tactic to ensure the public was aware of the possible risks of extreme weather, and had been proven to reduce damage.
But she added that there was a “concern that a named storm becomes less of an event”, when there are so many
Andrew Charlton-perez, a professor of meteorology at the University of Reading, said the frequency of named storms also risked “that people become desensitised and might not take action that would minimise the impact”.
A study led by Mr Charlton-perez in 2019 found that the public are more likely to take action to respond to a storm if it has been named.
But he said there was ongoing research on whether the frequency of named storms made a difference to people’s motivation to take action.
Steve Willington, the Met Office chief meteorologist, said that “with the damage and clean-up still under way, we could potentially see more impacts from Storm Jocelyn” than Storm Isha.
‘There is a risk that people become desensitised and might not take action that would minimise impact’