Named storms to come this season

With autumn underway, and with wet and windy weather on the horizon, here's a reminder of the 2024/25 storm names.

The UK Met Office, in partnership with Met Éireann and the Dutch National Weather Service (KNMI) have just revealed the names for the 2024/2025 Storm Season, which begins on September 1st.

The first three storms of the season have already been felt. Here is the full list:

You may notice that the letters, Q, U, X, Y, and Z will not be used. This is due to the lack of variety in names with those letters, but also to maintain convention with the US hurricane warning system.

Storms are named when they could cause ‘medium’ or ‘high’ impacts in one of the three partner countries.

Meteorologists say the naming practice helps provide consistent and authoritative messaging in times of severe weather.

The naming of storms in the UK and Ireland came to fruition in 2015 by a “Name Our Storms” campaign run by the Met Office and Met Éireann following the St Jude’s Day storm in October 2013 that killed 17 people across Europe.

The first named storm was Storm Abigail in November 2015 and since then, names suggested by the public have been used.

Other groups in Europe also name storms and the agreed practice is that when any national weather service names a weather system, all other weather services keep that name.

Ex-hurricanes or ex-tropical systems that cross the Atlantic Ocean also retain the name they are given by the US National Hurricane Center – as happened with Ophelia in October 2017 and Kirk earlier this month.