Why would a Hurricanes name be retired?

Names associated with storms that cause severe loss of life or property damage are retired by the World Meteorological Organization. The idea of permanently retiring a storm name began after the 1954 hurricane season when Carol, Edna and Hazel ravaged the East Coast.

What are the requirements for a hurricane name to be retired and who determines when a hurricane name is retired?

The current list of names recycles every six years, unless a hurricane gets its name retired. Any nation impacted by a severe hurricane can lobby the WMO to have the hurricane’s name retired.

Do they ever reuse hurricane names?

The naming of North Atlantic tropical cyclones is currently under the oversight of the Hurricane Committee of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). This group maintains six alphabetic lists of twenty-one names, with one list used each year. This normally results in each name being reused every six years.

What happens if all hurricane names are used?

A name is retired only if a storm is so deadly or costly that the future use of its name on a different storm would be inappropriate and insensitive. If all 21 names were used up in a season, the Greek alphabet was used. That happened only twice – in 2005 and then during last year’s record-shattering hurricane season.

When did they start using male names for hurricanes?

In 1953, the United States began using female names for storms and, by 1978, both male and female names were used to identify Northern Pacific storms. This was then adopted in 1979 for storms in the Atlantic basin. NOAA’s National Hurricane Center does not control the naming of tropical storms.

Why are there no XYZ hurricane names?

“The letters Q, U, X, Y and Z are just not common letters that names begin with,” said AccuWeather Senior Meteorologist Dan Pydynowski. The lack of names beginning with those letters explains why they don’t appear on the list of Atlantic tropical cyclones.

Why are hurricane names reused?

The use of easily remembered names greatly reduces confusion when two or more tropical storms occur at the same time. For example, one hurricane can be moving slowly westward in the Gulf of Mexico, while at exactly the same time another hurricane can be moving rapidly northward along the Atlantic coast.