What I am finding is that everything in terms of storm naming is rather fragmented because we have one system which is jointly operated by the UK and the Irish Republic, another system which is jointly operated by France (who were responsible for giving Storm David (the very storm system which did all of that damage down south on Wednesday night and the early hours of Thursday morning) its name) and the two big Iberian countries, probably another system which run by the Germans and possibly others as well, that we don't know about.

I know that this might sound a bit controversial given the current political situation here in the UK, but it would surely be better if there was just the one storm naming system which was run by all of these European countries together. That raises the question of which countries should be part of that but if these were to be the same countries which are covered by the European Space Agency, this would actually solve that problem once and for all because both meteorology and astronomy are both sciences at the end of the day, if the European Space Agency can work well in the field of astronomy, there is no reason why a common European storm naming system can't do likewise for the field of meteorology.

Furthermore, this would be completely unaffected by political developments such as Brexit, which means that there would be no question of the UK not being part of this common system once that happens. Within this common European system, any country within that would have the power to name of particular storm if they believed that it would have the greatest impact in that country and once that happened, whoever was responsible for naming that storm would then be obliged to collaborate with the other countries within that system in order to ensure that public awareness of that, as well as the possible impacts of that storm system was raised as soon as possible.

To me, that would work far better than the rather fragmented system which we have just now, and this would mean that this would help to avoid the same situation arising again, that we saw recently with Storm David where the general public within at least one country (such as the UK) is left completely in the dark as regards to what is actually happening.

---

Totally agree. This is exactly the type of situation where a pan European system makes total sense. The current fragmented system is worse than no system at all because it just creates confusion - which is exactly the opposite of what it is supposed to achieve.

There's an article in The Times today about the unnamed storm and the confusion with Fionn which was a different disturbance called by the  Irish Met. Quite a debacle. On the other hand much better news for the UK Met is the collapse of Carillion. 

---

Here is the full, and in my view at times rather smug, blog post from the Met Office about the "unnamed storm". Note the public comments at the end which pick up a number of the points that I made above.

https://blog.metoffice.gov.uk/2018/01/18/should-the-met-office-have-named-last-nights-storm/

The Met Office did reply to a number of the comments but frankly didn't add much to the debate. 

One comment from the Met Office was "A storm will be named when it has the potential to cause an amber or red warning." Okay - but the storm did result in an amber warning albeit for snow not wind. But she then goes on to say that snow impacts are taken into account when naming storms."Storms systems’ could be named on the basis of impacts from the wind but also include the impacts of rain and snow". There is no explanation as to why the storm did not meet the naming criteria which a cynic might interpret as suggesting they either have something to hide or were just incompetent in this case. The only comment being "The warnings were constantly under review to ensure they reflected the expected level of impacts and also whether the low pressure system would meet our storm naming criteria, which in this case it didn’t." No explanation of why.

The following link is to an example on the Met Office web site of a medium likelihood, medium impact wind storm resulting in an Amber warning. In fact it is storm Desmond from 2015.

https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/guide/weather/warnings-case-studies/wind-warning-amber-2

Points to note are that the wind gusts are remarkably similar to those of this week's storm. In fact the storm this week had higher gusts in a wide range of locations. Many sites saw gusts above 70mph and the highest was 83mph. There is a reference to 43,000 homes without power and gable end walls and roofs being damaged. The post storm verification stats gave the Met Office 9/9. Now I think given the Met Office is a public organisation that we pay for, they should be obliged to publish the verification stats for all warnings that they issue. That would focus their minds a bit more.

Looking at the link below to the BBC article on this weeks storm. the impacts were clearly greater than for storm Desmond. Wind gusts were slightly higher, the number of homes without power was much higher (with some rural communities at risk of being cut off), homes were damaged (reference here to a gable wall), multiple key train lines were blocked by trees and bridges were closed.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-42729662

So the medium impact criteria were clearly met. The only reason the Met Office could have for not issuing an amber warning is that they thought, in advance, that the likelihood of these impacts happening was lower than medium. Well the models had been predicting the storm for many days. It is true the intensity of the storm was downgraded a bit as it got closer. But the output from earlier days would have put the storm at the high end of an amber warning, possibly even a red warning. There was enough data from the models, even on the day before the storm, to suggest a more than low risk of significant impacts from the weather system.

So in conclusion I think the Met Office should award themselves 0/9 for the way they handled this storm. They got the warning wrong and failed to correct this even as a nowcast adjustment when it was clear that significant impacts were actually occurring.