The storm names for the 2024/25 storm names have been announced by the Met Office. Storms are named in partnership with Met Éireann (the meteorological service in Ireland) and KNMI (the Dutch national weather service), with this being the tenth year of the storm naming project to help raise awareness and inform the public of the risks of upcoming storms. Storms Ashley, Bert and Conall will be the first named storms of 2024-25.
This year, the Met Office are celebrating their 170th birthday and have therefore included three historic names in the list for the 2024-25 season: James, Lewis and Mavis. James is named after Group Captain James Stagg, whose D-Day forecast was critical to the outcome of World War II. Lewis after Lewis Fry Richardson, who devised a theory to use maths and physics to make weather forecasts using computers, and Mavis after Mavis Hinds, who undertook pioneering work on the earliest Met Office computers
The tradition of naming storms began in 1953 in the United States when the National Hurricane Centre (now the World Meteorological Organisation) began assigning female names to storms and hurricanes, with male names introduced from 1978 onwards. However, it wasn’t until 2014 that the Met Office in the UK decided to start giving storms male and female names in a similar tradition.
The Met Office, Met Éireann, and the KNMI select each years’ list of names from suggestions submitted by the public. The names are selected based on popularity and how well they represent the different cultures, nations and diversity across Britain and Ireland. Storm names are assigned in alphabetical order, however, to remain in line with the US National Hurricane naming conventions, storms are never assigned names beginning with the letters Q, U, X, Y and Z. This year, Met Office suggestions include names of people who work to protect the public in times of severe weather, as well as submissions from the public.
Storms are named when they could cause ‘medium’ or ‘high’ impacts in one of the partner countries and help provide consistent, authoritative messaging in times of severe weather.
If a storm is named by a different storm naming group and impacts the UK, the given name will be used in communications. In addition, if the remnants of a hurricane has moved across the Atlantic to impact UK weather, this would be referred to as an ex-hurricane with its previously given name.
The 2023/24 storm season was an active one and set a new record with 12 named storms. The naming of storms in the UK started with the 2015/16 storm season and whilst we only have storm names data for the previous eight previous years, we’ve averaged around 7 storms per storm season. Until this year, the very first storm season (2015/16) held the record for the greatest number of storms per season at 11.
Below are the storm names for 2024/25:
AshleyQ, U, X, Y, Z not included to be in line with US National Hurricane Centre naming convention.
We have written a blog all about the 2024/25 storm names, including information about why they are named. It highlights some of the significant storms that have affected the UK in the 2023/24 storm season. Please click here to read it.
Click here to read the Met Office news article for more information about the 2023-24 storm names.
