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Last weekend, 100mph winds battered the north of Ireland, before hitting Scotland, too. Millions in both countries were issued red warnings, and told to stay home; air travel was disrupted; pictures abounded of piles of bricks that were recently bits of buildings. Worst of all, on either side of the North Channel, young men were killed when trees fell on their cars. All this thanks to the “once in a generation” Storm Éowyn.
The thing is – it doesn’t feel once in a generation, does it? It feels like this is happening more and more. The most memorable weather event of my childhood, not counting the day my wellies froze to my feet and my mother cut them off in a panic, was the Great Storm of 1987, which among other damage took out six of the seven eponymous Sevenoaks and killed 18. That, though, had no name. We recall it as the Great Storm in large part because these things felt a rarity.
Now, though, each winter reliably brings several storms, which we are all extremely aware of. In one particularly nasty week in February 2022, barely had Storm Dudley (killed nine, 225,000 power outages) passed, when Storm Eunice (killed 17, 3.1 million power outages, included the strongest gusts of wind ever to hit England) arrived, followed almost immediately by Storm Franklin (thankfully rather smaller).
All of which raises two questions – one light and diverting, the other definitively not. Why did we start naming storms? And are we actually getting more of the things?
Parts of the world with rather more memorable weather than these islands have been doing this for a long time. In the colonial era, Caribbean hurricanes were generally named for saints’ days: Hurricane Santa Ana, which hit Puerto Rico on 26 July 1825, for example, or a pair of Hurricane San Felipes which hit on 13 September in 1876 and 1928. In the 1950s, the US briefly used the phonetic alphabet to name storms, before replacing them with women’s names on the grounds that Hurricane Audrey would be more memorable than Hurricane Alpha. In 1978, presumably in a victory for the second wave, they started using men’s names, too.
Europe didn’t get into the game until September 2015, when the UK’s Met Office and Ireland’s Met Éireann announced a two-year pilot to name every storm system that qualified for either amber or red warnings, suggesting serious risk to life or property. It was successful enough that KNMI, the equivalent office in the Netherlands, joined in 2019, on the grounds that it tends to get the same weather as the islands to its west. (Each agency now picks seven names a year, to make a combined list of 21.) Other groups of European countries soon began their own lists, too: this is why, if you’re wondering, the storms do not always arrive in strict alphabetical order.
The arguments for all this are broadly the same as those employed in the US all those decades ago: that naming storms boosts public awareness of risky weather events. A name, after all, carries personality, in a way that “the late January north-west Atlantic weather system” does not. Apart from anything else, storms can famously both persist and move, rendering physical or temporal labels misleading.
Is the fact all this has been thought necessary yet another symptom of anthropogenic climate change? There are certainly those who think our weather is becoming more dangerous. On Friday, the Guardian quoted Hayley Fowler, professor of climate change impacts at Newcastle University, who said that her team’s models suggested climate change was making “storms like Éowyn more frequent, with more intense wind speeds and much higher rainfall amounts”. As the climate warms, she added, “we can expect these storms to become even more intense, with greater damages”. Bleak as this is, this certainly feels true.
That said, last winter the Met Office’s Dr Amy Doherty stressed that the UK had a long history of storms, and the number varied wildly from year to year. “In our observational records, it’s hard to detect any trend one way or the other in terms of number and intensity of low-pressure systems that cross the UK,” she said. “While our climate overall is getting wetter, there are no compelling trends in increasing storminess in recent decades.”
This caution speaks of the difficulty of distinguishing between weather, which happens today, and climate, which take place over decades. There’s clear consensus among experts regarding the existence and threat of man-made climate change – but even they can disagree about exactly what that’ll mean at ground level, and whether individual weather events can be attributed to it. It likely feels as if the UK has more storms these days at least partly because they are named, and thus, via the media, we are more aware of them. Raised awareness was, after all, the point of the exercise.
Incidentally, I had, as someone who knows embarrassingly little about Ireland, assumed Éowyn to be a traditional Irish name, but no: it turns out it came from the UK Met Office. It’s not the first such unusual name, either: in November 2021, these islands were battered by Storm Arwen.
Someone in the Met Office is clearly a Tolkein fan. But for all the benefits of naming storms, I’m not sure it will make anyone happier to tell their insurer their roof was torn off by a character from Lord of the Rings.
[See more: Are Scotland and England swapping places on education?]