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How Hurricanes Get Their Name

Posted on: Thursday, 3 September 2009, 12:20 CDT

During the yearly Atlantic hurricane season, the names of these tempestuous storms because almost household names, and many wonder if there is a rhyme or reason for the seemingly random titles, according to an AFP report.

All of the previous names of hurricanes like Wilma, Rita and the infamous Katrina are officially “retired” and will never be given to another storm. This allows for new names to be given to weather systems as they emerge each hurricane season.

The World Meteorological Organization’s Hurricane Committee has the official job of retiring and replacing names. The group devotes a portion of its annual meeting on voting to remove and add names.

People have been naming tropical depressions, storms and hurricanes for hundreds of years, mainly because it makes it much easier for coastal stations and ships to identify and share information about weather systems.

During the 1800s, West Indies storms were usually named after the saint’s day on which they happened, like the ferocious Hurricane Santa Ana, which claimed hundreds of lives when it hit Puerto Rico in 1825.

The naming of storms was popularized by meteorologist Clement Wragge in the 19th century and was used formally by the Miami-based National Hurricane Center in 1953, when six lists of female names were put together, each list containing a name for all but five letters in the alphabet.

"There's five letters that we do not have in there -- q is one of them, and then u, x, y, z. And the reason for that is there are not enough names... that we'd be able to put them in the list and have enough to replace them," National Weather Service spokesman Dennis Feltgen told AFP.

Meteorologists began to assign male names to storms forming in the Eastern North Pacific in 1978, and the next year the practice expanded to include Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico weather systems.

The six lists are rotated to ensure that whatever names are not used from this year’s list will be up for grabs again in 2015.

There has only been one instance since reliable records began in 1944 where an Atlantic storm season had more storms than names and had to resort to using the Greek alphabet.

The 2005 season, which had the included the overwhelmingly destructive Hurricane Katrina, saw a record 27 named storms, ending with Delta, Epsilon and Zeta.
 
That year saw a record five names retire: Dennis, Katrina, Rita, Stan and Wilma.

According to Feltgen, there have been over 70 names retired for the Atlantic Ocean, Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico region combined. The process of coming up with  new names also tends to be a low key process that does not attract much attention.

However, when the Hurricane Committee tried to add names like “Israel” and “Adolph” to the Eastern North Pacific storm list in 2001, there was a huge outcry.

Despite the fact that Israel and Adolph, spelled differently than Adolf Hitler’s name, are typical boy names, Jewish leaders were so outraged that the names were officially retired at the end of the season.

Image courtesy of Mike Trenchard, Earth Sciences & Image Analysis Laboratory , Johnson Space Center.

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On the Net:

• World Meteorological Organization
• National Weather Service

Source: redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports

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