How are hurricanes named?

If you've ever wondered where hurricanes get their names and why those names change year by year, AccuWeather's Geoff Cornish has answers for you.

Transcript

00:00What's in a name? Some of you may wonder how do these hurricane names get assigned and who picks them and who maintains the list and so forth.

00:09Sometimes names come back and they seem kind of familiar as if we've had them before.

00:13The World Meteorological Organization maintains a rotating list of names.

00:18In fact, different rotating lists for each oceanic basin.

00:21East Pacific, different from the West Pacific where there are typhoons, different from the Atlantic.

00:25And the Atlantic and East Pacific lists are rotated on a six year repeating cycle.

00:29So actually most of the names of this year's storms we've seen before back in 2018.

00:34And they're going to be back again in 2030 unless they're fierce enough to be retired.

00:38We may not see another barrel. We'll have to see what they decide to do in March.

00:43The World Meteorological Organization decides on the retirement of some names if they're extremely costly, deadly or high impact.

00:51One of these examples was Florence back six years ago.

00:54You might recall that was the tremendous flood producer that we've been talking about.

00:57We just had the six year anniversary of that.

00:59That was the last time Florence will ever be used.

01:01So Francine became the new F storm in this particular list.

01:05And that list will be repeated again in 2030.

01:08There have been many I names that have been retired.

01:11In fact, as we get into the full stride of the hurricane season, by the time we hit the letter I,

01:16we're several storms into the season, typically in September.

01:19And that is when we often see our fiercest of storms.

01:23So there have been more I named storms retired than any other alphabetic name.

01:27So back in the early 1900s, storms like the fiercest, one of the fiercest we've ever had was the Galveston hurricane in 1900.

01:34They were named kind of arbitrarily.

01:36The Labor Day hurricane in 1935 was a huge one.

01:40Back in 1953, they began to use an alphabetical sequence, initially using only female or women's names.

01:46Now we alternate men and women's names, male and female, since 1979.