The Naming of Hurricanes
From the sound of it, hurricanes are cute, friendly things. After all, they have names, just like our friends and relatives. As it turns out, tropical storms and hurricanes have names instead of numbers to make them easier for us to recognize and remember. After all, it's pretty obvious that "Look out, here comes Jeanne" is a lot more likely to get the public's attention than "Tropical Storm #10 on the way." Using human names also makes it less likely that there will be confusion about which storm is being discussed. As evidenced by the past several weeks, many hurricanes can be active at the same time.
The current naming system of alternating male and female names has been in place since 1979. There are many different claims about who started naming storms in the first place. Names were given to storms several hundred years ago, beginning with using the years that they occurred. This evolved into a system of using the name of the saint on whose day the storm fell. An Australian meteorologist named Clement L. Wragge started naming Australian weather phenomena using primarily biblical names. There are several others who used names for storms in a similar fashion. There are rumors that World War II Navy meteorologists names Pacific tropical storms for their wives and girlfriends whom they missed.
In 1950, the phonetic alphabet was used by the U.S. Weather Bureau to name storms. The standardizd names of Able, Baker, Charlie, Dog, etc. were used in sequence. Three years later, they switched to using a series of women's names. In 1978, the World Meteorological Association decided that this was sexist, and men's names were alternately incorporated into the list. To take the Atlantic basin as an example, there are six lists that are rotated. This means that the same names are used every six years. The lists are alphabetical, and contain all letters except for Q,U,X,Y, and Z, which are not very popular first letters for names. Some storm names are retired, if there has been a particularly strong storm with a lot of damage or deaths. This can help to avoid confusion in the practical matters such as insurance claims in the aftermath of a storm. Andrew (1992) is an example of this, that name will never be used again. Since the list of names is rotated every season, an entire list is rarely used up.