National Hurricane Centers

The practice of assigning human first names as the designations for hurricanes is a seemingly whimsical but helpful method for disseminating method about these potentially very harmful meteorological phenomena. Because of the necessity on the part of a hurricane center of informing people as to the severity and proximity of hurricanes, easily remembered monikers that mimic human naming practices can be a boon for the transmission of information by both formal and informal methods through the large population served by a hurricane center. This practice is relatively new in the currently ordered manifestation it takes. It dates back to 1953, when the idea of naming hurricanes in the manner of humans was first implemented by the National Hurricane Center. Today this measure stands as an important component of the National Hurricane Center’s contribution to weather awareness.

The National Hurricane Center is located in Miami, Florida and has existed since 1898, when it was created on the orders of President McKinley. Prior to the regularization of the hurricane naming process which the Hurricane Center enacted, hurricanes had been assigned feminine names during World War II by broadcasters for purposes of convenience and generally in an ad hoc fashion, in which an informally agreed-upon coinage would become widely accepted. In the early 1950s measures were put into place to place the naming of storms on a regular basis. At first, from 1950 to 1952, experiments were made by the National Hurricane Center to use the designations supplied from the phonetic alphabet that are widely known for their military usage. In 1953, the decision was made by Hurricane Center authorities to replace this system with one based on assigned the first names of women to hurricanes. The National Hurricane Center’s decision in regard to gender stemmed from the common practice in English of speaking of inanimate objects as “she,” and was maintained by the Hurricane Center until 1979, when, in response to the complaints made that this practice constituted a subtle form of sexism, it was decided by National Hurricane Center authorities to adopt the new practice of alternating feminine and masculine names on a yearly basis.

This year also marked the start of the Hurricane Center practice of preparing a list of prospective hurricane names before the season began. As has traditionally been the case, names are assigned to storms in alphabetical order, according to in which order they come in the year. In reference to the culturally predominant languages of the regions accessible to Atlantic hurricanes, the standard has been set by the Hurricane Center to assign names of French, Spanish and English provenance to the storms. Responsibility for the naming of storms no longer belongs to the National Hurricane Center but has been adopted by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), which among other functions performs the task of retiring hurricane names, which usually occurs when the storms they were named for proved to be exceptionally destructive. The WMO meets either every year or every other year.