The Tribune

SINCE 1953, Atlantic tropical storms had been named from lists originated by the National Hurricane Center in the United States. They are now maintained and updated through a strict procedure by an international committee of the World Meteorological Organisation. According to its wesbite, http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/, the lists are used in rotation and re-cycled every six years, so the 2012 list will be used again in 2018. The only time that there is a change in the list is if a storm is so deadly or costly that the future use of its name on a different storm would be inappropriate for reasons of sensitivity. If that happens, then at an annual meeting by the WMO committee the offending name is removed from the list and another name is selected to replace it. Several names have been retired since the lists were created. If a storm forms in the off-season, it will take the next name in the list based on the current calendar date. For example, if a tropical cyclone formed on December 28, it would take the name from the previous season's list of names. If a storm formed in February, it would be named from the subsequent season's list of names. In the event that more than twenty-one named tropical cyclones occur in the Atlantic basin in a season, additional storms will take names from the Greek alphabet. There is an exception to the retirement rule. Before 1979, when the first permanent six-year storm name list began, some storm names were simply not used anymore. For example, in 1966, 'Fern' was substituted for 'Frieda,' and no reason was cited. There are, however, a great number of destructive storms not included on this list because they occurred before the hurricane naming convention was established in 1950. For several hundred years many hurricanes in the West Indies were named after the particular saint's day on which the hurricane occurred. The Hurricane Center website reports that Ivan R. Tannehill described in his book 'Hurricanes' the major tropical storms of recorded history and mentions many hurricanes named after saints. There was 'Hurricane Santa Ana' which struck Puerto Rico with exceptional violence on July 26, 1825, and 'San Felipe' (the first) and 'San Felipe' (the second) which hit Puerto Rico on September 13 in both 1876 and 1928. The website explains that Tannehill also tells of Clement Wragge, an Australian meteorologist who began giving women's names to tropical storms before the end of the 19th century. An early example of the use of a woman's name for a storm was in the novel 'Storm' by George R. Stewart, published by Random House in 1941. During World War II the practice apparently became widespread in weather map discussions among forecasters, especially Army and Navy meteorologists who plotted the movements of storms over the wide expanses of the Pacific Ocean. In 1953, the United States abandoned a two-year old plan to name storms by a phonetic alphabet (Able, Baker, Charlie) when a new, international phonetic alphabet was introduced. That year, the United States began using female names for storms. The practice of naming hurricanes solely after women came to an end in 1978 when men's and women's names were included in the Eastern North Pacific storm lists. In 1979, male and female names were included in lists for the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico. The Hurricance Center website explains the reasons for even having a naming convention: "Experience shows that the use of short, distinctive names in written as well as spoken communications is quicker and less subject to error than the older, more cumbersome latitude-longitude identification methods. "These advantages are especially important in exchanging detailed storm information between hundreds of widely scattered stations, coastal bases, and ships at sea. "The use of easily remembered names greatly reduces confusion when two or more tropical storms occur at the same time. For example, one hurricane can be moving slowly westward in the Gulf of Mexico, while at exactly the same time another hurricane can be moving rapidly northward along the Atlantic coast. In the past, confusion and false rumors have arisen when storm advisories broadcast from radio stations were mistaken for warnings concerning an entirely different storm located hundreds of miles away." These are the names for the 2012 Atlantic tropical cyclone season: Alberto Beryl Chris Debby Ernesto Florence Gordon Helene Isaac Joyce Kirk Leslie Michael Nadine Oscar Patty Rafael Sandy Tony Valerie William