Hurricane Names - What's in a Name?
By: Slade Ogletree
Hurricane Andrew, Hurricane Hugo, Hurricane Camille…and more recently; Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita were all devastating hurricanes that hit the US. Where do these names come from, who picks them out, and why name them at all? It’s all based on tradition.
From the time that Europeans started coming to the “New World”, and for centuries after, hurricanes were named for the saint’s day that they made landfall. Katrina, by that standard, would have been named St Genesius (for the patron Saint of actors) in Florida, and in Louisiana, St. John the Baptist (in memory of his beheading). That would have been confusing, albeit somewhat appropriate.
Latitude and longitude coordinates were tried for a while, but those change constantly as the storm makes its way from Point A to Point B. It was confusing to the meteorologists at the time, it would be confusing to me, and would dumbfound the general public. That was no good.
During WW II meteorologists began giving women’s names large weather systems, and it caught on. In 1950 the WMO (World Meteorology Organization) decided to name hurricanes using the Army’s phonetic alphabet. The first storm would be Able, the second Baker, and so on.
In
1953 the WMO decided to give women’s names to the storms, and to retire
the names of significant storms, thus saving their place in infamy.
My guess is that somebody had a really bad divorce!! In 1979,
feminists convinced the WMO to use men’s names as well, in a boy-girl-boy-girl
alternation. (Another bad divorce?) That’s the start of the system
that we use today.
Because of the shortage of names beginning with the letters Q, U, X, Y, and Z, names beginning with those letters are not used. Each year a series of names is randomly picked for that year. One set is for the Atlantic basin and another for the EPAC, or Eastern Pacific basin. The names are used, then after six years, they are thrown back into the pot for recycling. Names in the Atlantic and EPAC are not duplicated within this six year cycle.
Interestingly enough, if a storm develops into a hurricane
on the Atlantic side, crosses Central America and emerges on the EPAC
side as a tropical storm or hurricane, its name would then change to
the next available EPAC name. We had a situation similar to that
here in Baja in 2003 when Tropical Storm Larry hit the South-eastern
coast of mainland Mexico, almost dissipated, then emerged on the
other side to merge with an existing Tropical Depression that became
EPAC Hurricane Olaf.. Just in the past days, another example of
this nearly occurred when TS Stan crossed the Mexican mainland, and
merged with another disturbance in the EPAC. That, had it developed,
would have then been called TS Pilar.
Rita is name number seventeen, out of twenty one possible. What do we name the 22nd storm of the year? Alpha, yes, Alpha. Should all 21 names be used within a single season, we switch to the Greek alphabet, giving us another 24 names to work with, but that hasn’t happened in recorded history.
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The
worst storm season on record occurred in 1933. There were 21 storms
documented in the Atlantic basin that year, but that was before we had
implemented our current system of names.
Hurricane activity is believed to be cyclical, with the cycles lasting for decades. The 1960’s through the mid 90’s are thought to be in the “lesser activity” part of the cycle. The past 10 years have seen an increase in both the frequency and severity of storms signaling, say most scientists, that we are entering the “more active” part of the cycle.
Some attribute this increased activity to Global Warming. While Global Warming is, and rightly should be, at the forefront of our minds; most meteorologists agree that this increased activity is more influenced by the cyclical factors than a drastic shift in the planet’s climatology.