Warning fatigue creeping in with dozens of alerts

AFTER the tempestuous start to the year, finally the weekend weather looks relatively benign.

Today (bar the far north and west of Scotland where gales of 60mph and heavy rain is predicted) it should be dry and decent for much of England.

It is a similar case for tomorrow, with the exception of some northern and western areas of England which face a wet and windy afternoon.

Despite this typical January weather, nearly 80 flood warnings and alerts remain in situ across England alone.

This is not to denigrate the importance of weather warnings. Your correspondent has visited enough inundated homes and villages to know the serious destruction that flooding causes and the need for an early alarm.

But the sheer number of alerts is in truth near impossible for anyone to keep on top of. Liz Bentley, the chief executive of the Royal Meteorological Society, acknowledged as much this week, when she noted that “probably not a day has gone by without a weather warning”.

If yellow weather warnings of the sort issued by the Met Office for Storm Jocelyn this week are continually in place, Ms Bentley pointed out, “people will start to ignore them”.

Jocelyn, after all, is the 10th named storm of this winter, making it the busiest season since the practice of nomenclature was adopted in 2015.

We are in a quandary, really. Climate change is whipping up wilder, more frequent and more prolonged weather patterns, and yet how does one prevent the public from becoming simply inured to this fact?

Certainly, adopting increasingly hyperbolic language runs the risk of forecasters being regarded as crying wolf. Our weather is rapidly changing beyond the normal boundaries of human existence – but we are yet to find the words to comprehend it.*

A windswept walker on the streets of Leeds