BY ANY OTHER NAME
Year after year us weather hounds watch the hurricanes come blowing though the different parts of the globe. We hear the alphabet of names start on “A” and run the gamut until the end of the season. Does anyone remember the year the United States of America had to resort to the Greek alphabet? That was an incredible season!
Have you ever wondered where those names for the hurricanes come from? Well, the names are on a list in the hands of the World Meteorological Organization. Letters of the alphabet that are never used are Q and Z. When there is a horribly destructive hurricane that arrives, its name is retired, never to be used again. Some of the forty retirees are: Allison, Floyd, Georges, Iris, Katrina, Keith, Lenny and Michelle.
The naming system of hurricanes began in 1953 with the National Hurricane Center. Previous to that year all tropical storms, which is how a hurricane begins, were labeled with the latitude and longitude of its location. This older system became quite cumbersome as everyone tried to remember each designation, making it difficult to communicate and therefore caused errors. With the introduction of the new naming system, communication was easier, faster and something the public could understand. Hurricanes could be tracked by anyone. So the populace had a better chance of survival in their wake. The United States borrowed the idea of naming hurricanes after women from an Australian meteorologist that started that practice a century ago. In the Indies for hundreds of years they named their hurricanes after the daily Saints.
The storms that the United States calls hurricanes occur in the Atlantic and Eastern Pacific oceans. The same thing is called a typhoon in the Northern-Western Pacific and Philippines, while they are referred to as a cyclone in the Southern Pacific and Indian oceans. In 1979 the naming convention began using both men’s and women’s names. There are four to eight lists of names for each section of ocean that receives these storms. Most are recycled every four to eight years, while others are sequential. The following is a partial list acquired from the NOAA’s National Hurricane Center.
USA OCEANS 2009 2010 ATLANTIC Ana Alex Bill Bonnie Claudette Colin Danny Danielle Erika Earl Fred Fiona Grace Gaston Henri Hermine Ida Igor (etc.) (etc.) PACIFIC Andres Agatha Blanca Blas Carlos Celia Dolores Darby Enrique Estelle Felicia Frank Guillermo Georgette Hilda Howard Ignacio Isis (etc.) (etc.)
Lists from the Philippines and North Indian Ocean also run on a rotation. Other lists can run sequentially, rather than on a rotational basis. These lists are for Fiji, Northwestern Pacific, Australia, New Guinea and Southwestern Indian oceans. Once the names on the annual lists (such as near the United States) are exhausted for the given year the Greek alphabet is then put into place running Alpha through Omega if necessary.
