Hurricane Names

Unlike the storms themselves, the names proceed in an orderly fashion.

Here are the hurricane (and tropical storm) names relevant to Americans from now through the rest of the decade, according to NOAA and the World Meteorological Organization.

Elsa seems more like she should be a winter storm, doesn’t she?

Hurricane names are rotated out every six years, with the list only changing if the hurricane was particularly bad or memorable. There was a Hurricane Chris this year but also one in 2018 and 2012, and a Tropical Storm Chris in 2006.

(Is Debby bad enough that its name will get retired in 2030? It was pretty bad in 2018, but not bad enough, apparently. We’ll decide that after we get some distance from it.)

The practice of naming storms like this goes back a long way, but they often were only assigned such names after they blew through. The practice of giving them human names as they were forming got its start in the 1950s.

You’ll notice there’s an attempt at gender parity here, with names alternating between male and female as you go down the list, and also as you go across from year to year. Debby is followed by Ernesto, then Francine, then Gordon, and the “D storms” from year to year are Debby, Dexter, Dolly, Danny, Danielle, and Don. A few names like “Sean” are gender-ambiguous. “Male” hurricane names didn’t join the official lists until 1979.

What if there are more than 21 storms in a year? That’s pretty rare, but there’s a system for dealing with it—which has changed in the last decade or so. Used to be that “bonus storms” were assigned Greek letters, but that got confusing when Hurricanes Theta, Eta, and Zeta followed in quick succession. Now there’s a supplemental list of names, currently Adria, Braylen, Caridad, Deshawn, Emery, Foster, Gemma, Heath, Isla, Jacobus, Kenzie, Lucio, Makayla, Nolan, Orlanda, Pax, Ronin, Sophie, Tayshaun, Viviana, and Will.

These storm names only affect the region of the North Atlantic, Gulf of Mexico, and Caribbean Sea. Other regions have other predetermined names—some of them following the same sort of system as above, others more country-specific. Each region’s storm names tend to reflect common names found in that region.

In some of those other regions, names beginning with Q, X, Y, and Z get the attention they’re denied in Americans’ part of the world. The Southwest Indian Ocean has the names Quincy, Xila, Yekela, and Zaina ready to go this year.

Something about the idea of naming storms feels a bit held over from out pagan ancestors, from the days when we blamed the weather on the gods instead of random air currents (or our own climate impact). Nobody’s named a hurricane Thor, but in 2017, France experienced a Cyclone Zeus.