I'm looking at it with a half curious eye wrg to snow potential

Barring a late surprise, it is the Friday - Saturday one which I think will become Storm Darragh.

They’re not all Irish, the names for each season are compiled jointly between Met Éireann (Ireland), the Met Office (U.K.) and KNMI (The Netherlands).

There's also been a trend, I feel, to have the low "bomb" that bit further west, which pulls the strongest winds further west. As an example, here's the 12z (left) and today's 0z (right) max wind gusts from ICON. It's worth noting though that yesterday's 0z had far lower winds all round, the process of refining the exact track/intensity continues.

https://images.meteociel.fr/im/62/23313/iconeu_uk1_52_120_0pqy6.png 

https://images.meteociel.fr/im/71/26451/iconeu_uk1_52_120_0vdj2.png 

Ashley, Bert, Conall, Darragh, Éowyn, Floris, Gerben, Hugo, Izzy, James, Kayleigh, Lewis, Mavis, Naoise, Otje, Poppy, Rafi, Sayuri, Tilly, Vivienne, Wren

https://www.theweatheroutlook.com/weather-news/7244/uk-storm-names-2024-25 

Wrt Christmas events this weekend, I would expect a lot to be cancelled or at least scaled back. 

Although the low this weekend is not named yet, I would expect it to be named either by MetEireann or by UKMO when yellow warnings are refined and an amber added for specific areas later this morning.

This is the first 'Irish name' storm of the season. And I only see about 3 Irish names in the full list:

https://www.met.ie/forecasts/storm-names 

It does, however, seem out of kilter with the automated forecasts. The animation shows winds below 50 here throughout (wahey!) but the automated has 24 hours of gusts in the 50s, peaking at 57 (not so good). Hopefully the animation will be closer to the mark for here at least.

Wales, the western half of NI and SW England look like being the most seriously battered. The highest wind gust on the Met Office model shows 92mph in Cardigan Bay. The western Channel and Liverpool Bay get +80mph gusts also. This model has the low slide away SSE'wards as it crosses the UK, so keeps the strongest winds away from the E & SE, with winds topping out around 60-64mph.

Met Office site forecast has it peaking in MBY at 62mph, and we're 10 miles inland.

There's still differences how the various models are plotting the low - and therefore the focus of the strongest winds.

Arpege & ECM, for instance, have it tracking further north and so the most extreme winds hit Liverpool Bay then track eastwards, re-energising on the east coast, especially around East Anglia. But peak gusts around 65mph

GFS (6z) closer to the Met Office evolution

I'm going to bring in a couple of the less robust Xmas deccies for 24 hours.

Supposed to have been getting three big trees heavily pruned on Saturday morning. I'm assuming this won't be going ahead! But I'd prefer the lows to be further south (sorry! self-interest alert! 😁)

With Storm Bert, the Met Office did a Friday livestream on YouTube just before we were impacted by Storm Bert and there was someone on there who asked that same question about Storm Bert.

Aidan McGivern who was one of the presenters of that livestream answered that by initially confirming that it was Met Eireann who named Storm Bert but he didn't seem all that enthusiastic about giving that answer as he then went on to explain that this is really only a technicality. He explained that the reason why it was Met Eireann who named that was because Ireland was impacted by it before the UK and went on to say that even if Met Eireann hadn't named it first, the Met Office would probably have named it anyway and given that this would still have been done under the same naming system, the question of who actually named that storm didn't actually matter in that case.

I would imagine that this is probably also the case with Storm Darragh but I like to know who has named each storm anyway for statistical reasons. If it was the Met Office who named Storm Darragh, this will be the first storm of this season which the Met Office have actually named otherwise this is yet another storm which has been named by Met Eireann without the Met Office having named a even a single storm so far (even the Dutch have named one of those storms (Storm Connal)).

Either way though, this is clearly turning out to be yet another very busy season for these named storms which we're still less than three months into.

UK met has me down for 58 knot gusts late Fri. Probably the highest I've ever seen this model forecast for mby. 

To me though, this storm looks very typical of modern winter era.  

Going to be a rough one - unusual wind direction and long duration coupled with saturated ground is going to lead to a lot of tree damage I think.

I bet the Scilly Isles are in for a proper pounding.

Is this looking like the 'storm of the year'? 

It also has the most extensive storm-force winds, going with a worst-case combo of the other models, so as well as Irish Sea coasts of Wales & NW England, it has similarly strong winds for the SW, which then travel all along the south coast, before bringing period of 70-80mph gusts all down the North Sea coasts of England and intensifying the gusts through the Straight of Calais.

I think it's definitely got all the hall marks of 'storm of the year'.

Thankfully it'll be a couple of days after the peak of the Spring tides.

St Martins (my old home on the islands) has a forecast average windspeed above 50mph for over 24 hours straight - that will not be fun. I expect there'll be a big swell running. The harbour webcam on St Mary's will be worth watching - a NW wind will have the swell impacting the harbour wall with some impressive results I imagine.