The Met Office have named the next 21 storms to hit the UK

Hurricane Brian, Caroline, James, Rebecca and Paul could hit the UK over the coming months.

It is now the third year that names have been used to describe the extremely stormy weather in the UK and Ireland. The public gets to decide the names which has been found to help raise awareness of upcoming harsh weather conditions. The first storm of the year will be female and will be named ‘Aileen’, the gender of the first storm alternates each year and follows Angus in the 2016-17 season. Derrick Ryall, Head of Public Weather Services at the Met Office, said: “Last year was another successful pilot of the storm naming project and it’s great to be now making it operational. Naming storms has been proved to raise awareness of severe weather in the UK, crucially prompting people to take action to prevent harm to themselves or their property.” Storms are normally handed a unique name when it is decided that they have the potential to cause medium to high impacts on the UK and/or Ireland which generate a yellow, orange or red weather warning status from the Met Office In order to comply with international storm-naming conventions, they do not include names beginning with Q, U, X, Y and Z. Here are this year's names: https://twitter.com/metoffice/status/905430398926278656

• Aileen
• Brian
• Caroline
• Dylan
• Eleanor
• Fionn
• Georgina
• Hector
• Iona
• James
• Karen
• Larry
• Maeve
• Niall
• Octavia
• Paul
• Rebecca
• Simon
• Tali
• Victor
• Winifred