Storm Arwen set to batter festive shoppers with 80mph gusts
CONCERN for Christmas shoppers has prompted a storm warning from the Met Office with festive preparations set to be disrupted by winds up to 80mph.
Anyone planning to put up lights, buy their tree or visit a Christmas market should keep an eye on the forecast as Britain’s first winter storm closes in this weekend. Storm Arwen is the first named storm in the season, which runs from September through to the end of August 2022.
Christmas markets including those in Glasgow, Edinburgh, York and Sheffield are already open, with thousands of shoppers expected.
The most severe winds are expected on the east coast of Scotland and northern England today and tomorrow, where flying debris and large waves could cause “danger to life”.
Tom Morgan, at the Met Office, said pre-christmas outdoor activities made it important to draw attention to the storm. The weather service is in regular contact with organisers, he added.
Mr Morgan said: “There’s a lot of outdoor events at the moment like Christmas markets, and there’ll be people putting up Christmas decorations on their homes and things this weekend.
“So it may well be that the winds bring some disruption to that and some damage locally.
“The way we do our warnings is based on an impact level, so rather than just looking at the maximum winds that we might be expecting, we consider what day of the week it is, the number of people that might be travelling, what time of day it is.
“That goes into our consideration and our thought process as to whether we need to go to an amber warning, and sometimes we might go to a red warning should, for example, the strongest winds coincide with populated areas, and also busy times of the day, such as Monday morning rush hours.
“The impacts, the number of outdoor activities and number of events going on, that all comes into the decisionmaking process on whether we should go amber or whether we should name a storm. It’s all about putting the message out there to the public.
“We don’t name every low-pressure system in the UK because we don’t want to over-warn. We want to highlight severe weather events to the public and to the media channels, so that’s why only low pressure systems that bring very windy weather are named.”
Storms are named in alphabetical order according to a pre-announced list compiled by the Met Office alongside its Irish and Dutch counterparts, Met Éireann and the KNMI, using names suggested by the public.
The unusual direction of the wind will also cause more damage than usual this time, Mr Morgan added.
“Usually, in this country, where we have very windy spells of weather the wind is coming from the south-west or the west.
“It’s quite unusual to have very, very strong winds from a northerly direction. And Storm Arwen will be moving down from the North, and the winds will be from a northerly direction. So buildings and trees and things like that are perhaps less hardy and more vulnerable to damage.”