July 10, 2006 — Ever since hurricanes began to get human names there's been the risk that your name could be linked to a killer. Last year it was Katrinas around the world who suddenly found their name synonymous with disorder, death and destruction.
Whenever this happens weather officials mercifully "retire" the name, which is why you won't see any more storms named Katrina, Hugo, Fran or Mitch. But what about the Greek alphabet, which is used when the names run out? How do you retire Pi? And how do they come up with all those names anyway?
"I hadn’t really thought much about it until my name came along," said broadcast meteorologist and AccuWeather columnist Katrina Voss. She explored the matter of hurricane names and her own experience last year as Katrina went from a pretty name to the epitome of disaster in an essay in the latest issue of the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (BAMS).
When Katrina first showed up as a possible threat, the TV anchors who interviewed her about the growing storm would tease her about her name.
"You can’t call attention to it and not make a joke about it," Voss told Discovery News. But that didn’t last. When Katrina became a Category 5 hurricane aimed at New Orleans, "the jokes got curtailed." It got her to thinking about why we name the storms in the first place.
"I think there is something a little bit deeper in naming them with people’s name," Voss said.
At some level we do invest the storms with angry, malicious human qualities. That’s one reason there was a push from the feminist movement to include not just women’s names on the list. Since then names from other cultures have also been added to reflect the regions affected by North Atlantic storms. There is even talk of some African names being added soon.
But why create the problem by naming them it at all?
"Perhaps by naming, and specifically, by using names that are familiar in our respective cultures, we are expressing our desire to control, or at best to understand, nature," offered Voss.
As evidence, she points to the other stormy regions of the world where there are also lists of regionally familiar names (see them all at www.nhc.noaa.gov/aboutnames.shtml).
Right now in the North Atlantic there is always a list of 21 names which are designated by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), with letters Q, U, X, Y and Z left out. If, as in 2005, there are more than 21 storms with winds that exceed 74 miles per hour — the hurricane threshold — the list flips into the Greek alphabet.
Which poses another naming problem, says engineer Howard Epstein, who wrote a tongue-in-cheek essay on the matter in BAMS: How do you "retire" a Greek letter after it becomes a horrific storm?
"This would wreak havoc," wrote Epstein. "There may no longer be gamma rays. Instead we might have gan rays (Georgian), gim rays (Armenian), or gimel rays (Hebrew)."
The WMO has recently decided that if a Greek letter-named hurricane should be disastrous, they will not retire the letter, but add the year to the end of it to change its official designation. So a killer hurricane named Alpha, for instance, would become Alpha2006.
But that’s all after the damage is done to the Greek letter. As Epstein pointed out. "I don’t think they’ve quite worked it out yet."
