Winking Gerald puts wind up UK over storm names
MET Éireann has got all hot and bothered over the names of several storms and has forced its UK counterpart to change them.
Emails between Ireland’s forecasting service and the UK’s Met Office reveal differences over how the yearly list of serious weather events is decided.
The correspondence, released under Freedom of Information laws, shows Irish meteorologists took issue with a British suggestion for Storm Patrick.
‘The name “Patrick” is a bit clicheIrish (and also of course closely associated with a specific date, March 17th) so suggest Peter or Paul instead here?’ wrote Gerald Fleming – the ‘winking weatherman’, who stood down as the country’s chief forecaster just weeks ago.
Last August, the Met Office contacted him, then Head of Forecasting at Met Éireann, with a suggested list of names for the latest storm season.
It had filtered out ‘sensitive/inappropriate names’ and pointed out ‘we probably need to add a Welsh name’.
Mr Fleming suggested Dylan, but added: ‘Or is it too familiar (Bob Dylan) or too hackneyed (Dylan Thomas). Another possibility is Rhiannon (and we are probably unlikely to get to ‘R’). He added: ‘Could I also suggest a bit more Irish flavour…’
The forecaster asked for Daniel to be changed to Dónal, Finn to Fionn and Miranda to Maeve. And he said Nathan should be changed to Niall.
‘We have a big C&W star in Ireland called Nathan Carter, so probably best to avoid this in any case!’ he emailed. He added: ‘Certain sections of our media seem unnaturally interested in how many names “we” got as opposed to how many “they” got in!
‘I never encourage that line of thinking and just say that the list is agreed between us – which is no more than the truth!’ The changes caused the UK forecasters some pronunciation difficulties. ‘Is Fionn Fee-on or still FINN?,’ the Met Office asked. ‘Would it be NEE-ul, or NYE-ul, as I know both variants for Niall?’
Both national forecasting agencies agreed to run a pilot scheme in 2015 for naming storms, similar to a system used by the US National Hurricane Centre. It was suggested Abigail be the first named storm this side of the Atlantic because the US ‘started with boys this year’.
‘Yes, fine with Abigail, and good to put the females out front,’ wrote Mr Fleming.
The Met Office trawled through hundreds of names suggested in a public consultation.