Weather system naming in Europe

Tropical storms crossing the Atlantic keep the name assigned by the United States National Hurricane Center.

[3][4] After the new Australian government had failed to create a federal weather bureau and appoint him director, Wragge started naming cyclones after political figures.

Over the next few months, a total of eleven storms were assigned a name whenever a yellow, amber or red warning for wind was issued by either agency.

[18] After the season, it was determined that the project was a success, as the names had been adopted and accepted by the public, the media and emergency responders.

[18] As a result, it was decided to expand the naming scheme to include other weather types such as rain and snow, if its impact could lead to significant flooding as advised by their partner agencies.

[21][22] They decided to name a system if it was forecast to produce significant wind gusts over the country and result in the issuance of an orange or red weather warning.

[23] It was decided that a system within the Atlantic Ocean or western Mediterranean Sea would be named if it was expected to cause an orange or red wind warning in either France, Spain or Portugal.

[24] This created confusion within Denmark as the public thought that three separate depressions were impacting the country rather than a single system.

[25] In January 2017, the National Observatory of Athens (NOA) started to name weather systems, that would be expected to cause significant social and economic consequences in Greece.

[26] In order to do this, the NOA developed a number of criteria that took into account, what the meteorological hazard was as well as the size of the affected area and population at risk.

It was developed by Karla Wege, a student at the Free University of Berlin's meteorological institute, who suggested that names should be assigned to all areas of low and high pressure that influenced the weather of Central Europe.

[29] However, the order was leaked to the German press agency, Deutsche Presse-Agentur, who ran it as its lead weather story.

[29] Germany's ZDF television channel subsequently ran a phone in poll on 17 July 1991 and claimed that 72% of the 40,000 responses favoured keeping the names.

[28] In November 2002 the "Adopt-a-Vortex" scheme was started, which allowed members of the public or companies to buy naming rights for a letter chosen by the buyer, that are then assigned alphabetically to high and low pressure areas in Europe during each year.

[32] During 2021, the Meteorological Services of Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary started to use the names assigned to areas of low pressure by FU Berlin.