"Martin Rowley" wrote in message
...

"Brian Blair" wrote in message
...
As i read various reports from Hebridean Locals stating that it was the
worst storm they can remember, it is clear that rating a storm that way
is fairly hopeless as one would have to be in the same place and in the
same circumstances for each storm to make a decent judgement. snip As
usual if the Met Office don't then the news media will. Maybe if each
"extreme" weather event was put into perspective by the Mo,

... interesting concept: I wonder if some sort of mid-latitude 'index' of
severity has ever been attempted, other than a classification by central
pressure?

Yes, Hubert Lamb does this in Historic Storms of the
North Sea, British Isles and Northwest Europe, published
by CUP, 1991. He discusses different kinds of grading,
from the objective
windspeed^3 * Area affected * Duration

(choosing windspeed^3 rather than windspeed^2 as
representing wind power rather than simply wind force)

an estimation of total damage to the landscape,
or the number of deaths and injuries
or insurance losses

which are each open to interpretation.

I've been toying with the idea of extending this
to all major weather events ... but the problems of
comparing say a windstorm with a killer smog
are virtually insurmountable. Such an exercise
might be interesting, even of some value, but it
would be pretty subjective.

As far as the news media are concerned, they
are not interested in observations or rankings
for the sake of scientific accuracy ... it's simply
that numbers give the appearance of being
scientific or accurate. No-one was the least bit
interested that a river flood similar to the Carlisle
one happens in one catchment or another once
or twice or three times are year ... but
a local inhabitant quoted as saying that it was the
worst in 40 years is exactly what they want to
hear. Some of us may be in a position to set
the record straight (or maybe just "a bit straighter")
in a rather haphazard way because we have
access to one or two tiny corners of the news
media, but I certainly don't expect the Editor of
the Sun to read my Telegraph column and say
"Oh shucks, we got that a bit wrong, didn't we?"

It is, however, beholden on us (as meteo-
rologists and climatologists) to make an
accurate climatological assessment in the
specialist literature so that any subsequent
research does not have to start from scratch.

Philip Eden