Hurricane season is in full swing. Hurricane Fiona just strengthened to a category 3 storm, becoming the first major hurricane of the 2022 season. So far the storm has battered the Turks and Caicos, Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico. It’s expected to strengthen to a category 4 hurricane in the next few days.
That got me thinking…how exactly do hurricanes get their names?
Every year, tropical storms that are tracked by the National Hurricane Center are given a name when their speeds reach 39 mph. Hurricanes are given names to make messaging and communications less complicated. There are currently 6 lists of 21 male and female names that are updated and maintained by the World Meteorological Organization. Each list gets recycled every 6 years, so the list we’re using now will be reused in 2028. There are no names that start with Q, U, X,Y, or Z.
It wasn’t always this way, though. An Australian meteorologist named Clement Wragge first started using personal names to identify weather in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Before that, storms were named after places, saints, or things they hit. However, after Wragge’s retirement, the practice of naming hurricanes fell out of use for 60 years.
The National Hurricane Center started formally naming storms in 1950. They were originally named from a phonetic alphabet, but this was changed in 1953 in favor of using female names. The first tropical storm to get a female name was Hurricane Alice in 1953. Men’s names were added to the list in 1978. The first storm with a male name was Hurricane Bob in 1979.
When hurricanes are especially destructive or fatal, the names are retired from the list. Katrina, Irene, Sandy, and Harvey are some of the more recent names to be retired. When a name is removed, the World Meteorological Organization meets to decide on a replacement name.
The rest of 2022’s hurricanes will be Gaston, Hermine, Ian, Julia, Karl, Lisa, Martin, Nicole, Owen, Paula, Richard, Shary, Tobias, Virginie, and Walter.
Learn more here.