Updated at 9am.
THE FIRST PROPER winter storm of the season reached our shores yesterday (as you may well have noticed).
As coverage of the impending vortex of hideous weather gathered pace over the last 48 hours or so — soon newspapers, radio stations and pretty much everyone on social media was referring to it as ‘Storm Rachel’.
Hilarity, as they say, ensued.
So where did this whole ‘Rachel’ business come from, then?
As ardent readers will know, storm names are something of a pet topic here at TheJournal.ie.
So here’s the story, in a nutshell…
What’s in a name…
Met Éireann — as you may or may not know — don’t officially name storms.
That’s all set to change soon, however — Gerald Fleming revealed to this website just before Christmas that meteorologists in Ireland and the UK are working on a ‘storm naming’ project, set to launch in the coming months.
The logic? Essentially, once people know a storm is serious enough to have a name they can start planning for it — and it makes forecasting clearer too.
As Fleming said:
If we have a name on the storm people know what we’re talking about — we don’t just have to say ‘that storm that passed us by on the 14th of January last’.
Traditionally, storms are sometimes given names based on the nearest saint’s or other notable day (hence last year’s massive ‘Darwin’ — so-called because it landed on the anniversary of the ‘Origin of the Species’ author’s birthday).
The National Hurricane Centre in Miami is the only recognised agency to name Atlantic storms — while, slightly less officially, the the Free University in Berlin has been christening all high and low pressures since 1954.
In Ireland, some of the names given to storms here at the start of last year (‘Christine’ and ‘Ruth’) were popularised by TV3 weather presenter Deric Hartigan. However, a quick trawl through Twitter shows he wasn’t the first to start using ‘Rachel’.
In fact, it appears to have been christened by UK-based weather site Metcheck.com, which — in much the same manner as the Free University — has started assigning names for each Atlantic storm system that crops up.
This was the name’s first appearance on Twitter…
And this is their current list of allocated storm names…
The Germans are referring to the current weather system as ‘Gunter’ — their omission of an ‘h’ thereby depriving depriving this article of a near-perfect ending.
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