Greek alphabet retired from hurricane names
Sororities and fraternities can keep their Greek letters — hurricanes will no longer use them.
The World Meteorological Organization, which maintains the rotating list of hurricane names and retires storm names when appropriate, has decided to stop using the Greek alphabet for naming storms. These letters were designated for especially active seasons when the list of 21 names was exhausted.
Last Atlantic hurricane season, with a record 30 named storms, used nine letter names from the Greek alphabet. It was only the second time the Greek alphabet was used to name storms.
According to the World Meteorological Organization, this caused several issues. Pulling out the Greek alphabet garnered a lot of attention — perhaps more attention than the storms themselves.
The pronunciation of several Greek letters (Zeta, Eta, Theta) is similar. It can be confusing when storms with similar sounding names occurring simultaneously. There can also be confusion when translating these names into other languages.
But perhaps the biggest issue is how to handle Greek alphabet names that need to be retired. There was no formal plan for retiring Greek names, and during the 2020 Atlantic hurricane season both Hurricane Eta and Hurricane Iota made landfall in Nicaragua as
Category 4 storms. Hurricane Iota was the strongest storm at landfall in 2020.
James Franklin, former chief of forecast operations for the National Hurricane Center, had suspected the Greek alphabet would be addressed by the Hurricane Committee, which serves North America, Central America and the Caribbean.
He said ditching the Greek alphabet previously came up after the 2005 Atlantic hurricane season, the other year these names were required, but those storms weren’t as strong or damaging as Eta or Iota.
“I think it will come up again now that Eta and Iota were very, very powerful landfalling storms,” Franklin said in a November 2020 interview. “Whether the committee will be any more amenable to the suggestion this year than they have in the past, I don’t know.”
It appears the Hurricane Committee was more amenable this time.
Committee members decided to retire the names Eta and Iota, which caused extensive flooding in Nicaragua, Honduras and other adjacent Central American countries and resulted in at least 272 fatalities and more than $9 billion in damage losses, according to the news release.
They also retired Laura and Dorian (Dorian was in 2019). Laura was the Category 4 hurricane that skirted Houston and made landfall near Cameron, La. It was responsible for 47 direct deaths in the U.S. and Hispaniola and caused more than $19 billion in damage.
Dorian, a Category 5 hurricane, was the strongest hurricane to hit the northwestern Bahamas in modern records. It caused $3.4 billion in damages, mainly in Abaco and eastern Grand Bahama Islands. The Inter-american Development Bank, an agency which the government of the Bahamas asked to conduct a study of Dorian, stated that the hurricane left 29,500 people homeless and/or jobless, according to the news release.
Hurricanes are named using a rotating list that’s recycled every six years. Dexter will replace Dorian on the list of names in 2025, and Leah will replace Laura on the list of names in 2026.
There have been 93 names retired from the list since 1953, when the current naming system began.
As for the Greek alphabet, Hurricane Committee members will create a supplemental list of names A-Z (excluding Q, U, X, Y and Z) that would be used for the next hurricane season when 21 names is just not enough.