Brian Wakem wrote in
:

Unfortunately the programme description (in Digiguide) contains this
little gem - "With wind speeds almost double that of a hurricane".

Similarly in my aforementioned TV snippet it came back to the studio and
the presenter said to the awaiting weather forecaster: "But of course the
great unanswered question is: was it a hurricane?" - which Peter Cockroft
managed to explain away.

Of course they were quite right and it wasn't a hurricane: unfortunately
the forecast failed spectacularly - much as it did for the Paris storm on
December 26th 1999. For me, we still have a lot to learn in forecasting the
*really* severe events and I'm sure a lot of it comes down to sparsity of
observations when storms develop rapidly over the eastern Atlantic.

Richard