So how do storms get their names?
Dudley and Eunice and Franklin, oh my!
“Three named storms in a week,” a pal emailed the groupchat back in February. “I’m one storm away from cracking and becoming a storm themed supervillain called Storm Lad.”
Things did, indeed, get a bit stormy a few months back. On the Monday of the week in question, the Met Office named two different storms, which must make it one of the more meteorologically interesting Valentine’s Days we’ve had recently. Dudley raged across northern Europe for five days, killing nine and depriving 225,000 of power; Eunice lasted a day longer, killed twice the number and depriving around a dozen times as many of power. The latter also, incidentally, resulted in the strongest gusts of wind ever recorded in England: 122mph on the Isle of Wight.
Just as that was wrapping up, Franklin hit, the strongest of the lot, and swept an elderly couple in northern France into the Channel. A Met Office meteorologist named Becky Mitchell said it was the first time since the introduction of named storms had been introduced in 2015 that they’d used up three names in a week.
Since then, of course, the UK has experienced its joint hottest summer on record, and the whole country has turned roughly the colour of a Frazzle, so probably the most important question here is whether extreme weather events are becoming more frequent and to what extent anthropomorphic climate change is to blame. I’m a bit scared to ask that, though, and last week the authorities released the list of names they’d give storms this winter, so let’s talk about that instead.
Naming storms has a long history: in the Caribbean, hurricanes have been named for the nearest Saints days for centuries (the San Calixto hurricane of 1870, for example). The US authorities started labelling hurricanes with women’s names in the 1950s, on the grounds that “Hurricane Betsy”, say, was a more memorable and less potentially confusing label than “the Puerto Rico storm system”, not least because storm systems have a tricky habit of moving about. In the 1970s, they started naming them after men too, presumably because somebody had a word.
The UK Met Office decided to team up with Ireland’s Met Éireann to name storms in this part of the world, to raise awareness of dangerous weather systems after the St Jude’s day storm of October 2013 caused 17 deaths: the first named storm was Abigail, on 10 November 2015. Since 2019, the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI) has been part of the same system, on the grounds that most serious storms which hit the Netherlands tend to start somewhere to the west. This, in case you’re wondering, is why some of the names in contention sound a bit odd to British ears: because they’re actually Irish (Eunice) or Dutch (Franklin). Storm systems are simply allocated the next name on a pre-agreed list at the point when it becomes clear they have the potential to do serious damage to life or property.
As to how those names are chosen – a list is drawn up in advance, based on public suggestions (in Britain or Ireland), or KNMI proposals (in the Netherlands). Then somebody, somewhere, decides on the final list, though exactly who has proved surprisingly hard to pin down. The list for the 2022-23 storm season runs as follows:
Antoni
Betty
Cillian
Daisy
Elliot
Fleur
Glen
Hendrika
Íde
Johanna
Khalid
Loes
Mark
Nelly
Owain
Priya
Ruadhán
Sam
Tobias
Val
Wouter
You’ll note that this is not the complete alphabet: the US system for naming hurricanes skips the letters Q, U, X, Y and Z, so its various imitators around the world do so, too. Mostly this isn’t a problem, and historically, in the highly unlikely event there were more than 21 hurricanes in a year, the World Meteorological Organization would switch to using Greek letters. But after 2020 brought a record breaking 30 storms it decided that this might get confusing (“Which Hurricane Alpha do you mean, again?”), and announced that it would simply come up with two lists of names instead.
Hopefully we’re some way off similar measures being needed in this part of the world: the furthest down the alphabet we’ve made it so far is Storm Katie, back in 2016.
Three other wrinkles are worth noting before we move on. One is that we don’t start with an A name in January: the storm season runs from autumn to spring, so the first tends to hit some time between September and November.
Another is that there are times when the names might appear not to go alphabetically at all. That’s because different groups of national authorities around the world name different storms, and to prevent confusion the others tend to stick to their choices. Which, given that the whole purpose of the naming convention is to increase clarity seems to make sense, but it does mean that you might sometimes hear of a storm beginning with A when you’re expecting one beginning with D.
The 2021-22 European storm season, colour-coded. Image: Wikipedia.
The last is that, in the US system, there are some hurricanes that are so destructive that their names are retired from use, because they will forever be associated with a particular event. No matter how short of names we get, there will never be another Hurricane Katrina.
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