Dutch weather bureau KNMI has justified its issuing of a nationwide code yellow storm warning, and code orange in the south, even though hardly any rain fell, the AD said on Thursday.

The KNMI warned that heavy rain, hail, thunder and lightening would hit most of the country on Wednesday evening, but the storm largely bypassed the Netherlands and hundreds of people took to social media to vent their anger.

A code orange warning means there is at least a 60% chance of extremely dangerous weather.

‘Everyone knows what happened in Brabant last year with the hail storms,’ spokesman Harry Geurts told the paper. ‘We did not want that to happen again, so we decided to warn everyone as early as possible.’

The weather warning was widely circulated on news sites, including DutchNews.nl, on Wednesday.

‘To our surprise, Belgium bore the brunt of the weather,’ Geurts said. Most clouds then headed for Germany where they had ‘very heavy downpours’, he told the AD.

Geurts said he was sorry that so many people reacted angrily about the wrong forecast. People who begin ignoring the warnings are ‘taking a major risk’, he said. ‘Of course not all weather forecasts are correct. Weather is too unpredictable for that.’