How Do Hurricanes Get Their Names?

In meteorology, hurricanes and typhoons are regional names for tropical cyclones, and individual storms of each type are named by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), which maintains rotating lists of names. These premade lists are made up of easy-to-remember male and female first names, which makes it easier for the media and weather organizations to pull together clearer reports about the storms and helps the public prepare for them.

With respect to hurricanes in particular—that is, tropical cyclones that occur in the western Atlantic and eastern Pacific oceans—the naming system has evolved over the past century. In the United States, names given to hurricanes during World War II corresponded to radio code names for the letters of the alphabet (such as Able, Baker, and Charlie). In 1953 the U.S. National Weather Service began to identify hurricanes by female names.

The current system of alternating male and female names came into use for Pacific storms in 1978 and for Atlantic storms in 1979. The lists of names are recycled every six years; that is, the 2003 list was used again in 2009, the 2004 list in 2010, and so on. Names of the deadliest, most-damaging storms, such as the notorious Hurricane Katrina (2005) and Super Typhoon Haiyan (2013), are retired from the list after the storms dissipate, and in the list their names are replaced with other names.

During some especially active years, such as the 2005 and 2020 Atlantic hurricane seasons, when the list of named storms was exhausted, subsequent storms were named for letters of the Greek alphabet.