赶快躲 C 阿比盖尔号暴风雨即将来临

你会给一场强大暴风雨起个什么名字？想不出来？没关系。

Go home and shut all the windows because Abigail is coming! In this case, Abigail is not a very angry lady, but the name of a storm chosen by the public in an initiative by the UK weather service, the Met Office, and its Irish counterpart Met Eireann.

In the last few months they have compiled a list of names suggested by ordinary people. In alphabetical order, Barney is next, followed by Clodagh. You might find Katie down the line, and also Nigel.

The idea of giving peoples' names to storms is to make people more aware that bad weather is on its way – and it is more understandable than giving them the latitude and longitude. Following a convention by the US, no storms will be given names beginning with the less common letters: Q, U, X, Y and Z.

The National Hurricane Center in Miami has officially been naming the Atlantic's tropical cyclones since 1953 – men's names were included in the 1970s. But the list is maintained and updated by the World Meteorological Organization, a UN agency based in Geneva.

Names of storms considered too catastrophic are 'retired' and replaced. No more Katrina – the name of the devastating hurricane that killed nearly 2,000 in the US in 2005. Cyclones are upgraded to hurricanes if they reach 119km/h.

But what happens when there are too many storms in the world in a particular year? Julian Heming, tropical predictions scientist at the Met Office in the UK, explains: "If the remainder of the season is very active, it's not out of the question we'll have to... start using letters from the Greek alphabet."