Blowing up a storm: Abigail, then Barney, then Clodagh...

WHEN the next big storm hits Britain, weathermen won’t just call it a gale... it will officially be called abigail.

For the days of some anonymous tempest blowing over your fence or ripping the tiles off your roof are over.

The Met office has announced that from now on big winter storms will have names – and as these will follow an alphabetical order, the first will be abigail.

The name has not been chosen in honour of anyone in particular, merely because a is the first letter of the alphabet.

The big storm after that will be called Barney, f ollowed by Clodagh, Desmond, eva and Frank ... and so on, down to Wendy. There will not be any storms with names beginning with X, y, or Z, or with Q and u.

This is to ensure the uk system is in line with the american hurricane naming convention, which does not use these less common letters.

The Met office and its Irish counterpart, Met eireann, have been consulting the public over the past few months on suggestions for which names they should use for storms.

The theory is that giving a name to a storm – common practice in the us as in, for example, Hurricane Katrina which devastated new orleans in 2005 – helps raise awareness of severe weather and ensures greater public safety.

The St Jude’s Day storm, which blew up on the saint’s day, october 28, i n 2013 helped inspire the idea, the Met office have said.

Four people died as winds approaching 100mph battered southern england, uprooting hundreds of trees.

a storm will be given a name when ‘it is deemed to have the potential to cause substantial impacts in the UK and/or Ireland’ forecasters say.

The Met office said that to avoid any confusion over naming, if a storm is the remnants of a tropical storm or hurricane that has moved across the atlantic, the already established method of referring to it will continue, for instance ex-Hurricane Joaquin that reached europe earlier this month.

Two winters ago saw the stormiest period the uk had experienced for 20 years. at least 12 major winter storms blew between mid-December 2013 and mid-February 2014.

one of the worst, on February 4, destroyed a section of the coastal railway line at Dawlish linking Devon and Cornwall. During the period around 6,000 properties were flooded.

and two people died in a storm that reached hurricane force on February 12 and 13.

In the us this year, two storms have made landfall, Tropical Storm anna in South Carolina in May, and Tropical Storm Bill in central Texas in June.