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Storms hit the UK?
Ray Proudfoot
Posts: 131 Forum Member
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I've put a question mark in the title because I'm confused about how many 'storms' have hit the UK today.
Looking at any pressure chart shows a single deep depression crossing the UK today. One storm. So why do the BBC and others always refer to 'storms'? It's annoying!
And I also notice the metric obsessed BBC strangely switched back to imperial today to report '100mph' winds. Funny how they didn't report 161kph winds. Doesn't have the same ring does it? :rolleyes:
Looking at any pressure chart shows a single deep depression crossing the UK today. One storm. So why do the BBC and others always refer to 'storms'? It's annoying!
And I also notice the metric obsessed BBC strangely switched back to imperial today to report '100mph' winds. Funny how they didn't report 161kph winds. Doesn't have the same ring does it? :rolleyes:
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Or maybe you are being too literal or pedantic.
They have never reported wind speeds in metric as far as I know, neither do their weather forecasters (the charts always show wind speeds in mph). Indeed, the BBC generally never refer to kilometres, they always refer to miles (unless perhaps it is in a BBC World News report for world consumption). No, the BBC are not "metric obsessed" as far as I am aware, and as far as I have seen (and I'm an old-school feet and inches man).
I'm not being pedantic. If we were hit by a hurricane would it be reported that hurricanes had hit the UK? No, of course not. It's about being factually correct.
Therein lies the mess that we have in the UK with iconsistent use of measurements. Frozen Planet often referred to metric distances. I'd much rather hear miles, feet and inches but sadly it's more often kilometers, meters etc.
They may not use kilometers for wind speed but they do use the metric equivalent for temperature and pressure. A real mish mash if ever there was one.
Sorry but they're wrong. It is a single area of low pressure - a storm. How can it be changed into the plural?
But they give you temperatures almost always in Celcius and rarely in Fahrenheit. It's only a matter of time before kph creeps in. Mark my words!
Why confuse people, anyone interested in meteorology will be using knots, the majority of the rest of the population are more familiar with mph.
Whenever someone in the media tried ot use metric measurements for PC reasons they nearly always get at least one conversion wrong, often very wrong.
No objection to the plural 'storms'.
(Those aviation enthusiasts or frequents flyers may have noticed this)
pedantic adjective
Definition
giving too much attention to formal rules or small details
It was a joint production with foreign broadcasters, so it would not be unusual to quote SI units.
Then blame past Governments for not mandating a full metric system, or the Met Office who DO use those mixtures. As does every other UK broadcaster and weather bureau.. So why single out the BBC.
Oh, and millibars have been used for years (at least as far back as the 1960's), again coming from Met Office forecasts,
Good grief, there are more important things in life to get worked up about, this is NOT one of them.
If i'm wrong, so are the met office and so are the media.
Storm in a teacup:)
But weren't some of those foreign broadcasters American? I would not think they would want metric units though they might have their own sound track anyway.
It must be an incredibly slow creep, given the BBC have used a combination of celsius and mph on their weather maps since the 1970s.
As I understand it, and from memory and my A-Level Physics work, they started by moving to Centigrade, then some years later made the move to the Celsius scale, which is more correct, being based upon Absolute Zero (0 degrees Kelvin), or -273.15 degrees Celsius, rather than just -273 degrees Centigrade (that 0.15 of a degree makes all the difference it seems
Kilometres might be an international agreed SI system but I suspect that it will not mean much to many Americans just as people in this country will be mostly thinking in miles and mentally converting from kilometres to miles (often incorrectly).
Because an area of low pressure isn't a storm, it's an area of low pressure (a "low"). Or a depression. It may produce a storm, but storm isn't defined tightly like say a hurricane is (though storm force winds are defined). Storm has several related meanings and can refer to the wind strength, and/or or the associated heavy rain, thunder, lightning in any combination and isn't limited to winds of storm force. They can also occur in pockets - each pocket being a storm in its own right (sometimes a storm within a storm).
Also, some of the stormy conditions were generated by proximity to the depression centre while others were generated far away by the passage of a clearly defined squall line associated with a rapidly moving front, or in the lee of mountains which can suck high level high winds down to the surface, or by simply being on a coast facing into the wind.
Unlike a hurricane, these conditions were far from uniform both geographically and in time, storms is a good way to describe the situation yesterday IMO.