The weather forecasts on local radio early on Wednesday morning included a Met Office Severe Weather Warning, naming our local area specifically. Heavy rain expected, so be careful if you are driving.
The warnings were dropped from the forecasts later in the morning though it wasn’t made clear if this was because they had been withdrawn by the Met Office or the presenter had just forgotten about or gotten bored with them. But I wore my raincoat & swapped my sandals for leather shoes, though there was no sign of rain when I left the house at midday, carrying my heavy duty umbrella.
No rain in town that afternoon, but we know things can change radically within a few miles. And, though the hills were touched by low misty cloud when I got home in the evening, the pavements were bone dry, no water was dripping from the trees – there was no sign of rain at all. My umbrella stayed furled, might just as well have saved myself the bother of carrying it, left it at home.
In its determination never to be caught out by another Fish No Hurricane embarrassment The Met Office has gone overboard with its warnings, the overriding criterion which is ‘the strong likelihood of severe weather which may cause considerable inconvenience to a large number of people and/or present a danger to life.’ Needless to say these can cause anxiety & it was my suffering from such a lot of this when the national weather forecasts repeatedly failed to make it clear whether warnings applied to our area or not that contributed to my migrating to local radio.
But we still got subjected to worry about “Heavy rain - Rain expected to continue for at least two hours and to give at least 15 mm within a 3-hour period or, following previous heavy rain events, 25mm/day."
