MORE
ONLINEListen to the podcast
EVERY MONTH DICK RECORDS
A PODCAST OF HIS COLUMN
Listen online or download via:
http://www.yachtingmonthly.com/podcasts12 http://www.yachtingmonthly.com NOVEMBER 2015
T
here are any number of DIY weather
forecasting manuals and all of them
train us up the same way. There’s the
overview: the plan of a weather system
with its wobbly isobars, wind arrows and
knuckle-dusters of warm, cold and occluded
fronts, which you must try to
imagine as a whirlpool in the
heavens ranging across two
and a half thousand miles of
ocean, as it twists towards the
UK from the USA.
There’s the section of a
warm front mounting cold
air, rising up to produce fi rst
of all cirrus, then cirrostratus,
altostratus, nimbostratus
and stratocumulus cloud:
we’ve all held the drawings
up in the cockpit and tried
matching it to the grey murk
we are sailing through.
Buys Ballot’s Law, the coriolis effect,
secondary fronts, all are carefully drafted and
explained, but few of us try to make sense of
textbook theory on a dark and stormy night.
And none of it helps you much while listening
to the Shipping Forecast and wrangling with the
numbers of millibars to gauge just how bad an
approaching low pressure system is going to be.
Now, however, all our struggles are over.
From this autumn and on through the winter
thanks to what is either a dumbing-down
exercise, or a way of making forecasts more
accessible, the Met Offi ce and Met Eireann are
going to trial naming depressions just like their
American counterparts.
At fi rst I imagined this would take the serious
form of gales being named after relevant historic
game-changers. So instead of, low pressure
985 approaching south-east Iceland, we could
be presented with Hurricane Humbolt, Gale
Galileo, or Storm Shackleton.
But then I learned that members of the public
are to choose the names, perhaps in a bid on
behalf of the Met Offi ce to seem less elite after
being ditched by the BBC as its favoured weather
supplier. So bring on Storm Savannah, Gale
Jordyn and Hurricane Hayley.You can christen your own tempest via the
Met Offi ce’s Twitter account (@metoffi ce,
#nameourstorms), or its Facebook pages, or by
email. Names already linked to fatal storms, for
instance Mitch, Wilma or Katrina, will not be
accepted as they have been ‘retired’ for the sake
of good taste and if a storm
has already been christened
by another forecaster before
it hits our shores, no deed
poll to change its name will
be permissible.
Other names which have
already been used such as
Kyle, Whitney and Lisa, all
believe it or not the names of
Atlantic storms, are on a list
for recycling and cannot be
used for six years.
And only winds which are
likely to cause high impact or
medium disruption, say no less than Force 6 or
thereabouts, will be worthy of a moniker.
So a ‘yachtsman’s gale’ or ‘half a gale of wind’,
both enough in the wrong circumstances to give
a sailor medium disruption or high impact, will
remain unchristened. It may still prove to be
categorised in the cockpit as a bastard breeze,
however, which, in titular terms, may be quite
accurate upon refl ection. So what’s in a name?
Derrick Ryall, head of the public weather
service at the Met Offi ce believes naming storms
‘raises awareness’ of heavy weather before you
need to shorten sail. He may be right, but in my
opinion bad storms are only remembered after
they’ve sent tarpaulins abroad, knocked laid-up
yachts over like skittles or discovered the
weakest link in mooring chains.
For instance the 1987 hurricane which killed
18 people, felled 15 million trees and caused £
billion worth of damage, is remembered only by
the name of the Met Offi ce forecaster who said
it wouldn’t happen: Michael Fish. W‘Members of the
public are to
choose the names
of depressions, so
bring on Storm
Savannah and
Hurricane Hailey’
We’ve heard of the beast from the east, but now all gales
are going to be named in a bid to make weather simpler...