Survival

As you read earlier, the Galveston hurricane was called "The Great Storm." You can see how calling storms things like "great" could get confusing when you are comparing many storms. During World War II, the military started giving women’s names to big storms in the Atlantic Basin, and then in 1950 the World Meteorological Organization decided to go to an alphabetical naming system that used the military’s radio code. This wasn’t a good solution, though, because you could end up with more than one storm with the same name, so they decided to rotate names and retire the names of truly significant storms, just like you would retire the jersey of a star athlete. In 1979, they added men’s names, too.

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Even though there are 26 letters in the alphabet, they only use 21 letters for the names because some letters don’t have enough names that start with them. Can you guess which five they are? (The answer is at the very end of the assessment!) If there are more than 21 storms in a season, they start using the letters of the Greek Alphabet.

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The names are cycled every six years, unless a name is retired. That means that the names used in 2010 will be used again in 2016. Because the Caribbean has Spanish- and French-speaking people, the names reflect those cultures as well.
 

Since tropical cyclones exist all around the world, different regions have different names. If you look at the website for the National Hurricane Center below, you can find the naming systems for Australian cyclones, Indian Ocean cyclones and more!