Met Office New Weather Warning System

[wallopweather]

Was looking around the met office site this morning and went to the warnings page to find the South of England coloured yellow, apparently an advisory for a possible severe event.

The have done away with the red only weather warnings and introduced green: all clear, yellow: advisory, orange: be prepared and red: take action.

Its interesting that this change has been implimented after the recent gale force winds in which some areas did not have any form of warning even though the conditions would warrant some kind of advisory.

Lets hope the new system is used sensibly and that as a result people take more notice rather than dismissing the Met Office for over-reacting to none or minimal events.

It's also worth mentioning that NW have had a graded alert system for as long as I can remember, so hats off to NW for leading the way again.

[multi cellular thunderstorm]

Looks very good, but like you say hopefully they use it properly.

Looking forward to a 'be aware' for snow soon hopefully

[maidstone weather]

they had an article on their website about two weeks before the change happened, informing of the changes as to why they were necessary and how and when warnings are issued:

http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/weather/uk/guide/warnings.html

[wallopweather]

thanks for the link to the met info, much appreciated maidstone

[Phil UK]

Good to see the Met Office finally taking these warnings a tad more seriously, hence the coloured coding.

As an example. Monday 10th March... Severe weather warning in red for much of the south of England and Wales. Ok, granted. That worked with the LP eventually crossing over my part of the world but a maximum gust of 47Mph.

BUT!!

2 days later, the second storm which hit, the worst of the winds were expected much further north. At 05:20am, a gust of 50.6Mph hit my area, plus the winds were far more extensive and longer lasting.

That second storm was even worse, but was, and according to my local weather forecast the night before was expected to be less severe than Monday's.

They can't always get it right, I'll agree. Take where snow may or may not fall, deep snow or dusting even. Been too many faux pas's with the threat of the 'Worst Winter since xxxx' then turns out to be a complete non-entity for many. (I've seen that many times since I joined here initially in June 2003 and also goes for Summer thunderstorms.)

But with this new colour coding facility, it does give the chance to see who is at highest risk, minimal risk... Et al.

Phil.