The UK loves to crowdsource.
Perhaps the most famous example is the public voting ‘Boaty McBoatface’ as the preferred name for a new polar research vessel back in 2016. The National Environment Research Council—with its tail between its legs—vetoed the vote and chose RSS Attenborough instead.
Given we’ve had a couple of large storms roll through the UK in the past couple weeks, I got curious about how our storms are named. And I found that the crowdsourcing continues.
Every year, the Met Office invites the public to propose names. Last year more than 10,000 names were submitted. And once the list is published, the names of storms are used in order; alternating male and female for each storm.
Recent storms were named after an unruly cat (Storm Ruby), or a lightning-fast, goalkeeper grandson (Storm Logan).
Although we name storms because it helps people take their risk more seriously, I love how the naming process is fun, simple, and participatory at the grandest of scales.