Named for wind, remembered for water: what ten seasons of UK named storms say about flood risk

The 2026/27 storm season has already started on paper. The first of September marked the official start, and the new list of names begins with Austen, Boelo, Chloe, Dano and Evelyn. The names are chosen jointly by the Met Office, Ireland's Met Éireann and the Dutch national weather service KNMI, and this year more than 40,000 were suggested by the public.

For flood planning, what matters is less what a storm is called than why it gets named at all. Storms are normally named when they are expected to cause disruption or damage from strong winds that could trigger an amber or red warning. Heavy rain leading to flooding is also taken into account. In practice, the storms the UK remembers most painfully in recent years were named for wind but did their worst damage through water.

Ten seasons of named storms

The UK and Ireland began naming storms in the 2015/16 season, starting with Storm Abigail in November 2015, which brought high winds, lightning and snow and caused power cuts and school closures in northern Scotland. In the decade since, the system has become a familiar part of how the public and organisations respond to severe weather.

The busiest season on record was 2023/24, when 12 storms were named, beating the previous record of 11. That season started early, with Storm Agnes in late September 2023, and ran all the way to Storm Lilian in August 2024. The 2024/25 season began with Storm Ashley in October 2024, named by Met Éireann.

Two patterns stand out for anyone managing sites. First, the first named storm often arrives in late September or October, so the season's first real test can come before many organisations have finished their autumn preparations. Second, the storms that cause the most flood damage are not always the ones with the strongest winds.

Three storms remembered for flooding

The Environment Agency's own figures for three recent named storms show how much flood damage wind-named storms can cause:

Storm Babet (October 2023). The Environment Agency reported 1,260 properties flooded, while an estimated 41,000 properties were protected by its response. Babet came only a few weeks into the season and brought prolonged, heavy rain across parts of Scotland and England.

Storm Henk (January 2024). As of 9 January 2024, the Environment Agency reported 2,200 properties damaged by flooding across England. More than 102,000 properties were protected during Henk and the floods that followed. Henk arrived on catchments already saturated by an exceptionally wet autumn and early winter, which is why rain that might have been manageable in October caused widespread river flooding in January.

Storm Bert (November 2024). The Environment Agency estimated around 680 properties flooded in England, with 35,700 protected. The Welsh Government reported a further 433 properties flooded, most of them in South Wales. Bert shows how one storm can hit different nations very differently, and why a portfolio spread across England and Wales needs warnings from both the Environment Agency and Natural Resources Wales.

The ratios are striking. In each case, the number of properties protected was many times the number flooded. Defences and warnings work. But hundreds to thousands of properties still flooded in each event, and for the organisations that owned or ran them, the storm's name was far less important than whether they had acted on the flood warnings in time.

Why the flood risk comes later in the storm than the wind

For operations teams, the key point is that wind and flood risk run on different clocks.

Wind impacts peak during the storm. Damage to roofs, trees and power lines happens while the storm passes, usually within hours. Named-storm warnings are mostly built around that window.

River flooding often peaks after the storm has gone. Rain that falls over upland catchments can take hours or days to reach the rivers downstream. River levels at a site can keep rising long after the wind has dropped and the news has moved on. Storm Henk's flooding continued well into the following week for exactly this reason.

Coastal flooding peaks around high tide. If a storm's surge and waves coincide with a high spring tide, the danger window is the hour or two either side of high water, and it can repeat over successive tides. We covered this in our look at the storm surge season.

Earlier storms change the risk from later ones. Henk's damage was worse because earlier storms and rain had already saturated the ground. A storm's flood impact depends heavily on what the preceding weeks have done to the catchment.

That last point matters this year in an unusual way. The UK goes into the season with soils still much drier than average after the summer drought. In the short term, dry ground makes surface water flooding from intense rain more likely, a risk we discussed in our October flood outlook. If the Met Office's El Niño-influenced outlook for a wetter, stormier late autumn plays out, catchments could move from very dry to saturated faster than usual. That would set up the conditions where later storms produce Henk-style river flooding.

What this means for 2026/27 planning

A few principles follow from the record:

1. Don't plan around the storm's name. Plan around the flood warnings for each of your sites. A storm named for wind in Scotland may bring flooding to a site in the Midlands two days later, and an unnamed low on a spring tide can cause coastal flooding with no storm name at all.
2. Keep monitoring after the storm passes. Build a "recovery watch" into your storm response. River levels near sites should be tracked for at least 48–72 hours after heavy rain, not just while the wind warnings are in force.
3. Track the whole season, not single events. The flood risk from the fourth storm of the season is not the same as the first. Keep an eye on how wet catchments have become as the season goes on.
4. Get ready for Austen now. Our storm season readiness plan sets out the checklist to complete before the first named storm arrives. If recent seasons are a guide, that could be within weeks.

One view across wind, rain and tide

FloodWatch brings the official flood warnings and live river, rainfall and tidal data from the Environment Agency, Natural Resources Wales and SEPA into a single portfolio dashboard, refreshed on a five-minute cycle. During a named storm, that gives operations teams one place to see which sites are under a warning, what the nearest gauges are doing, and how things are changing after the storm has passed.

Storm names help the public pay attention. For organisations, the flood warnings that follow are what matter. See how FloodWatch supports portfolio flood monitoring across England, Wales and Scotland.