MET ÉIREANN HAS released its annual list of storm names.
The first storm of the year will be female and will be named ‘Aileen’ – and the list runs all the way from Brian and Caroline through to Victor and Winifred (although it’s worth pointing out that it’s very unlikely we’ll make it that far into the alphabet).
The gender of the first storm alternates each year and follows Angus in the 2016-17 season.
Here are the names for this year:
The storm naming project is a joint initiative of Met Éireann and the UK Met Office.
“Last winter was a very quiet one weather-wise and we only worked our way through five named storms, from Angus to Ewan,” head of forecasting at Met Éireann Gerald Fleming said.
“While it is too early to say whether the coming winter will be a stormy one or a quiet one we are prepared with a whole new set of 21 names for whatever nature may throw at us.
As before Met Eireann forecasters will work in close co-operation with our colleagues from the UK Met Office to keep all the peoples of these islands warned of impending severe weather.
The names for the next year have been compiled by Met Eireann and the UK Met Office.
As in previous years, Q, U, X, Y and Z will not be used in order to comply with international storm naming conventions.
Fleming explained the thinking behind the storm naming system when he announced the new plan back in 2014.
“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’ or something like that,” Fleming told TheJournal.ie.
It will give it some personality and it will allow people to relate to it more easily, because — particularly in a winter like last winter when we had so many storms — it will make it a little more easy to distinguish between them.
The introduction of the initiative followed a winter that saw a number of unofficially named storms – like ‘Darwin’ – make headlines.
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