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Sam Boal
Stormy McStormface
Brewing up a storm? War of words between UK and Irish forecasters over naming of 'Fionn'
A storm? Channel 4′s weatherman reckoned it was tantamount to “naming raindrops”.
MET ÉIREANN’S EVELYN Cusack has responded to criticism of the Irish weather service from a UK broadcaster who insisted Storm Fionn should never have been given a name.
Liam Dutton of Channel 4 News, a UK Met Office trained meteorologist, took to Twitter on Tuesday to take the Irish service to task over its decision christen the storm.
“#StormFionn that has been named by @MetEireann shouldn’t have been named,” Dutton contended, claiming it didn’t meet the required criteria.
It needs no more than a standard weather warning. It’s not even a low pressure with a storm centre, just a squeeze in the isobars. What next? Naming raindrops? It’s ridiculous!
The UK Met Office had earlier tweeted that the storm had been named by Met Éireann, adding:
… impacts are currently expected to be below warning limits in the UK.
Joint project
The Irish and UK weather services announced the joint storm-naming project in 2014 following a winter that saw a number of unofficially named storms – like ‘Darwin’ – make headlines.
“I can see his point in the sense that is wasn’t a traditional swirling vortex storm,” Cusack told Newstalk Breakfast today.
The forecaster added:
“We treasure all our citizens equally and we issued those warnings because of very high seas and very dangerous conditions in the south-west and west of ireland.
Recently there’s been some tragic deaths involving people swept off rocks and cliffs in very poor conditions.
Cusack observed:
I’m sure he didn’t imply any deep criticism of the Met Éireann meteorologists.
Dutton was back on Twitter today, sticking to his guns:
Stirring things up a little, the UK Met Office then chimed in with the following:
BBC’s Jen Bartram also had a view:
Prompting the following from Dutton, back at Channel 4:
There is, it’s worth pointing out, a European forecasting group that coordinates this sort of thing – it’s called the WGCEF Task Team on Storm Naming and you can find out more about it here. Evelyn Cusack is the current chair of the organisation.
Further reading: How did poor old Charles Darwin get dragged into the nation’s storm coverage? >
From this morning: Trees and roof blown away as snow-ice warning issued for 4 northern counties >
