Storm names 2025-26: How do storms like Amy get their names?

Storm Amy has been named by the Met Office and is the first named storm of the 2025/26 season.

The list of storm names is announced on 1 September each year and runs in alphabetical order.

This season it starts with Amy, followed by Bram, then Chandra, Dave and Eddie.

Storms are named by the UK Met Office, Ireland's Met Éireann or the Netherlands' KNMI when they are forecast to cause "medium" or "high" impacts.

Met Office Head of Situational Awareness Will Lang, who leads responses in times of severe weather, said: "We do it because it works. Naming storms helps to make communication of severe weather easier and provides clarity."

According to the Met Office, surveys following Storm Floris in August found that 93% of people in amber warning areas were aware of the alerts, and 83% took action to prepare.

Wind is the main factor for naming a storm, but sometimes rain or snow are taken in to account as part of the process.

Names are selected from a shortlist of suggestions from the public in the UK, Ireland and the Netherlands.

Amy was selected for 'A' as it was the most popular female name suggested to the Met Office.

But there were more personal reasons behind some of the names chosen, such as Fionnuala which was suggested by someone who said "My daughter's name... Good strong name! What you'd expect from a storm."

You may notice a few Dutch names too after KNMI, the national weather service of the Netherlands, became part of the western storm naming group in 2019.

Wubbo was a KNMI submission and a tribute to Wubbo Ockels, the first Dutchman to fly through space.

The list of storm names covers only 21 letters of the alphabet, to maintain consistency with World Meteorological Organisation naming convention of tropical cyclones around the world.

Regional centres such as the National Hurricane Centre - which names Atlantic tropical storms - produces six lists of storm names that are used in rotation and it is difficult to find six suitable names (one for each list) starting with Q, U, X, Y and Z.

So, if you are called Quentin, Ursula, Xavier, Yvonne or Zendaya you will never see your name on the list of storms.

After five storms were named in autumn and early winter, the weather turned a bit quieter with no further storms through the rest of that season.

It wasn't until August for the sixth and last storm of the 2024/25 period - Storm Floris - to bring widespread damaging winds and disruption.

In recent years the UK has seen frequent periods where the jet stream is either being directed towards the UK or to the south of the UK and this helped develop and steer low pressure systems to our shores which sometimes became named storms.

But no two years tend to be the same.

One of the challenges for forecasters comes from the natural variability in our weather patterns. In the 2022/23 season there were only two named storms and they both occurred in August.

And sometimes storms can come in clusters.

In February 2022 there were three storms in a week - Dudley, Eunice and Franklin. A Met Office red wind warning was issued for Storm Eunice. The winds gusted to 122mph (196km/h) on the Isle of Wight - England's highest recorded gust speed.

We know climate change is making our weather more extreme so that when it rains, that rain tends to be heavier with a greater chance of causing flooding.

It is more difficult to link storms to climate change.

The UK has a history of impactful storms stretching back hundreds of years, long before the introduction of named storms in 2015.

Met Office scientist Emily Carlisle says: "There is some evidence that storms with strong winds (windstorms) will become slightly more frequent in the future in north-west Europe and also become more clustered, so that we experience several storms one after the other."

Scientists are more confident that the coastal impacts of windstorms, from storm surges and high waves, will worsen as the sea level rises.