Who is Storm Austen named after?

The first storm of the new season is named after Austen H Nagle, who was an Englishman from Birmingham. He graduated from the University of London and went to work in the meteorological office of the then British air ministry, remaining there until he moved to Dublin.

He was appointed as the first director of the Irish Meteorological Service (IMS), now Met Éireann, in 1936.

The decision to name the first storm of the season after Nagle is in recognition of 90 years of the IMS.

Up to that point, Irish forecasting had been done by the British Meteorological Office, but the State’s growing role as a transatlantic air hub made an indigenous service a priority.

Operations began out of St Andrew’s Street in Dublin under Nagle, but it was not until 1941 that the service’s recruits were trained and it could satisfy increasing demand for weather reports on its own.

And it was not until 1948 that the IMS began supplying its forecasts to Radio Éireann, a service that was extended to newspapers in 1952.

According to the late meteorologist and Irish Times weather columnist Brendan McWilliams, Nagle was a “tough and very capable administrator”.

He stayed in his role at the IMS until 1948 when he joined the US Weather Bureau in Washington. He was succeeded as the head of the Irish weather service by Mariano Doporto, a Spaniard who had been on the losing Republican side of the Civil War and fled to Ireland.

Nagle went on to become the president of the World Meteorological Office Commission for Aeronautical Meteorology.

After retirement, he came back to Ireland to visit the newly opened Met Éireann buildings in Glasnevin. He died in 1984.

Storm Austen is the first storm of the season, which runs from one September to another.

It is coming to a county near you from Thursday night until Friday morning, bringing with it the prospect of heavy wind and rain to all parts of the country. The coastal counties from Clare around to Dublin will receive quite the battering on Thursday night into Friday morning and those counties are under an orange weather warning.

The naming conventions for winter storms are shared between Met Éireann, the UK Met Office and the Dutch meteorological service KNMI.

Met Éireann and the UK Met Office started naming storms in 2015, with KNMI joining them in 2019. Each weather service gets to name seven of the 21 storms.

Storm-naming is a relatively recent development on this side of the Atlantic, though it has long been in use in the United States.

The convention makes it easier for the public to be warned about the potential dangers involved.

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