Bye-bye Pi: Hurricane names will no longer go Greek

There will be no Hurricane Pi, Rho, Sigma or Tau.

The Greek alphabet has been retired as a way of identifying tropical storms, the World Meteorological Organization said Wednesday.

The decision was made after nine Greek letters were pressed into service last year during the record-breaking 2020 Atlantic hurricane season, which exhausted the normal list of 21 storm names prepared by the organization.

Greek letters had been used to name storms only once before, in 2005, another busy hurricane season that produced Hurricane Katrina, among others.

National Weather Service officials said the Greek alphabet got in the way of the main reason for naming storms — to help the public readily identify and track them. Many people were confused by the sounds of the Greek letters, and public

attention often focused more on the use of the alphabet itself than on the destruction caused by the storms, officials said.

“Zeta, Eta, Theta — if you think about even me saying those — to have those storms at the same time was tough,” said Kenneth Graham, the director of the National Hurricane Center, pointing to three Greek letters that were used in rapid succession to name three of the last storms of the season. “People were mixing the storms up.”

Graham said that the confusion was particularly evident after Hurricane Zeta hit Louisiana last year. He said he got phone calls from people who believed that Zeta was the last letter in the Greek alphabet and were asking what the next storm would be named.

In fact, Zeta is only the sixth letter in the 24-letter Greek alphabet. Omega is the last.

The World Meteorological Organization, a United Nations agency, said its Hurricane Committee had developed a supplemental list of names that could be deployed instead of Greek letters when the standard list is exhausted in a given season.

The 21-name backup list of Atlantic storms begins with Adria, Braylen and Caridad, and ends with Viviana and Will.

Like the main list of storm names, the supplemental list does not include names that begin with the letters Q, U, X, Y or Z, which officials said are not common enough or easily understood across English, Spanish, French and Portuguese, the languages frequently spoken throughout North America, Central America and the Caribbean.