Open Forum: How and why do hurricanes get named?

10:32 PM, Aug. 23, 2013  |  Comments
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THE QUESTION: The Daily Advertiser did not receive an Open Forum question from readers this week, but there is one question that has been asked frequently: How do hurricanes get their names?

THE ANSWER: Since the 1950s, meteorologists have been naming tropical storms and hurricanes. The reason? It just makes it easier to keep track of them, according to

Hurricanes get their names when they reach tropical storm force, with sustained wind speeds of 40 miles per hour. The names are generated by the World Meteorological Organization, headquartered in Australia, said Donald Jones of the National Weather Service in Lake Charles.

The names have been chosen in advance for six hurricane seasons. After each list has been used, it is recycled. Tropical storm and hurricane names have been chosen through 2018. In 2019, meteorologists will start over again with the first list. They can be viewed on, the National Hurricane Center website.

The current naming convention began in 1953, when only female names were used. Tropical storm and hurricane names have alternated between male and female names since 1979.

Tropical storms are named sequentially in alphabetical order. If there are so many hurricanes that the list is exhausted, the weather service uses the Greek alphabet to name subsequent storms: Alpha, Beta, Gamma, etc.

And it gets more complicated. There are actually several six-list sets - one for each region where hurricanes occur and each reflecting the region's common names.

When a hurricane is particularly destructive, their names are retired out of sensitivity to the people where it made landfall. Audrey, Katrina and Rita, for example, have all been retired.

The practice of naming hurricanes has been going on for hundreds of years, although it became official only in the latter part of the 20th century.

According to, people in the Caribbean islands named hurricanes for the saint on whose feast day a storm made landfall.

In the early part of the 20th century, storms were given numbers instead of names.

After World War II, they came to be named for the old Joint Army/Navy Phonetic Alphabet. That of course, was replaced in 1953 by the current system.

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