YP Letters: Time to stop crying wolf over misleading weather scare stories

Paul Hudson is the BBC Look North weather presenter.

LIKE many people, I avidly follow the weather forecasts, whether in the paper, watching Paul Hudson on TV or looking online.

Of course, we all need to know when a period of exceptional – good or bad – weather is predicted so we can take any precautions neccessary.

This is particularly neccessary for vulnerable groups.

Yet I can’t help wondering if certain areas of the media are a little over the top with their regular references to a forthcoming “big freeze”?

For to begin with, this can panic people into thinking the weather will be worse than is actually forecast.

I’m thinking of those “up to 10 inches of snow” headlines when that only applies to the Scottish mountains where nobody lives except sheep! And there is the danger of the boy who cried wolf factor, with so many stories of calamities that a real forecast of awful weather is dismissed as a hoax. Still, we await what is coming, for better or worse!