In 2015, the UK’s Met Office (their national meteorological service), as part of a partnership with similar agencies and groups in Ireland and the Netherlands, started naming significant storms that impacted their region.
For centuries, experts and governments have named tropical cyclones—a category of storm that (for this purpose) includes typhoons, hurricanes, tropical storms, and cyclones, depending on their scale and location—usually to make it easier to discuss powerful storms.
These names were historically derived from saint-oriented holidays, or in some cases just the year and location, as was the case with the 1938 New England Hurricane.
But the conventions for storm-naming have changed over the generations to account for shifts in cultural comfort with using saints’ names for this purpose, and in some cases for political reasons: not wanting to associate certain names with disasters and death, or not wanting to use exclusively female names for powerful storms, as was the case for much of the latter-half of the 20th century.
Today, the World Meteorological Organization uses a list of carefully curated names, optimized to be short, memorable, and hopefully not offensive for storms in different geographic areas, and in the Atlantic basin these lists are alphabetical and in English, but in other parts of the world, where more languages are spoken, the lists cycle through names from different cultures in the region.
In all cases, when storms are especially destructive, that storm’s name is retired from the list, but other curated names will eventually be re-used.
While this may seem like a complex undertaking for what may superficially look like an unnecessary component of the meteorological field, research has shown that folks are more likely to remember and discuss storms that have names, which seems to make it more likely that they’ll take such storms seriously if there’s something about them that makes them especially dangerous.
It’s been speculated that this heightened remembrance and consideration of named storms might be tied to what’s called “exemplification theory,” which says, in essence, that we group seemingly related events together because that allows us to make better judgements about them.
This would seem to be evolutionarily beneficial, as it would allow us, for instance, to remember all the experiences we had leading up to, during, and after earlier storms of sufficient strength, which would in turn make it more likely that we prepare accordingly for new storms that pop up on our mental radars (and which stick there, possibly, because they’re named).
By naming storms that seem significant, weather agencies can thus prime their audiences for what might happen next, allowing them to make preparations and be safer during an otherwise unsafe event, and the name affixed to this jumble of events takes advantage of what’s called the “availability heuristic,” which basically means we make judgements using information that most readily comes to mind—and naming things makes it more likely we’ll remember them (compared to other data that we might otherwise try and fail to recall because it blends in with all other such data).
In other words, the reason experts are naming more storms (including, increasingly, winter storms) is that doing so increases the readiness and safety of those exposed to these names, while also making it more likely that they’ll remember what happens, enhancing their capacity to cope with adverse weather events in the future.