St Jude, Christian or Carmen – whose storm is it anyway?

Britain and other countries name their extreme weather events in different ways, giving rise to confusion
Porthleven waves
A man takes photographs of waves at Porthleven, Cornwall, before the [insert name here] storm. Photograph: Ben Birchall/PA

The US government gives hurricanes pre-chosen names, such as Katrina, Rita or Wilma, strictly alternating between genders, but Britain and other countries prefer to name their extreme weather events in very different ways.

So the great storm of 1987, which toppled 15m trees, was named because it was obviously that. Equally, the storm of 25-26 January 1990 was dubbed the Burns Day storm because it hit Scotland hard and fell on Burns Night, and the Boxing Day storm of 1998 really could not have been called anything else.

This storm has been widely dubbed the St Jude's Day storm, after the saint day of the patron of lost causes, whose big day fell on Monday.

The name was chosen not by the Met Office but by Leon Brown, a meteorologist from Birmingham who works for the Weather Channel, which unilaterally chooses names for all winter storms. The channel argues that naming a storm raises awareness and gives it a personality all of its own.

The name was quickly popularised on Twitter and then by west country media. A woman named Dawn Drewery appears to have been the first to tweet it, last Thursday. She says she found a reference to it on the web.

But the name is being hotly contested and it is uncertain which one will stick. European storms used to be officially named after the person who first spotted them but today names are chosen by individuals using a scheme operated by the institute of meteorology of the Free University of Berlin.

Anyone can pay €299 (£255) to name a high-pressure weather system or €199 for a low-pressure one. Names alternate each year between male and female and are picked by lottery.

Officially, then, EU institutions are calling the St Jude's storm the Christian storm, named after someone called Christian Widera. To add to the confusion, Sweden has named it Simone and the European Windstorm Centre has called it Carmen.

Thank heavens, though, that the St Jude storm did not happen on Tuesday. If it had, it might have been called the St Narcissus storm, after an early Christian patriarch who is the patron saint of insect bites.