With weather disasters being reported all over the world this week, I started wondering about how storms were named. I found an article on wired.co.uk and now share some of it with you.
This story was originally published in February 2017 and has been updated for the new storm season.
Since 2015, the Met Office in England and Ireland’s Met Eireann have been naming storms that hit both countries. After the first year’s pilot, the Met Office continued this method, which is also used for hurricanes and other natural events around the world, into the 2016-2017 storm season and also the 2017-2018 season. The third round of naming began at the start of September 2017 and over the years it has been expanded to include different weather types such as snow and heavy rain.
The naming of storms using a single authoritative system should aid the communication of approaching severe weather through media partners and other government agencies,” the Met Office says on its website. It continues to say that naming storms has increased the awareness of people in the UK.
How are storms named?
When the pilot scheme was announced in 2015, the offices used social media to collect a list of names. Overall, 10,000 potential names were submitted and the list of names was sorted by the organisation’s staff members.
The names alternate between male and female and run from A-Z in the alphabet. However, in line with the US National Hurricane Centre, storms aren’t called names beginning with Q, U, X, Y and Z due to the low number of names that begin with these letters. When a potential storm is seen to be approaching the UK the meteorologists from the group assign it a rating of how dangerous it could be.
If this rating falls between the medium or severe categories, it is decided the weather system should be named. “Note that this means that all AMBER (ORANGE in the Irish system) and RED warning wind events will be named, along with some YELLOW warning events (i.e. those with a low or very low likelihood of ‘medium’ impacts),” the documents say.
Where storms have been named elsewhere in the world, the same name will be used and both of the weather organisations have to decide on a name.
The latest method of naming storms now takes into account rain, hail and not just wind. After the 2016-2017 storm season ended the Met decided to take the naming out of a pilot phase and continue to use it in the future.
What are 2017-2018’s names?
The start of September 2017 marked the beginning of the new storm season and the Met Office and Met Eireann selected 21 names, from 10,000 submissions collected during the initial crowd-sourcing period. The names are: Aileen, Brian, Caroline, Dylan, Eleanor, Fionn, Goergina, Hector, Iona, James, Karen, Larry, Maeve, Niall, Octavia, Paul, Rebecca, Simon, Tali, Victor, Winifred.
Excluded names
Documents from the Met Office, after its initial crowdsourced effort in 2015, detailed that no list of rejected names exists but said some were excluded in line with retired storm names from the Atlantic, North Pacific, Australian, South-West Indian regions.
“Other names were discounted because they were not proper names,” the Met Office documents say. These included Apocalypse, Baldrick, Big Boss, Gnasher, Hot Brew, root ripper, Stormageddon, Ssswetcaroline, Vader, Voldermort and branch wobbler. Other rejected names included: Hammer, Hades, Freebooter, Forkbeard, Megatron, Bluetooth, In A Teacup, Noddy and Poacher. The Met Office also said the names of retailers, such as B&Q and Asda, were excluded from the selection process.
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