“It’s All Greek to Me”

by Caleb, KE0FOE

For only the second time ever, we have run out of hurricane and tropical storm names in the Atlantic Ocean! This means that all new and forthcoming tropical storms and hurricanes this season in the Atlantic will be assigned letters from the Greek alphabet. Case in point: Tropical Storm Beta which is moving very slowly over the Gulf of Mexico right now. If another tropical system is named, it will be called Gamma, and then Delta, and so on in the order of the Greek alphabet.

The last time this happened was in 2005 which was the notorious season that spawned the very deadly Hurricane Katrina which devastated New Orleans and surrounding areas.

The naming of tropical systems dates back to 1950 when the military used their phonetic alphabet. In 1953 The United States Weather Bureau began creating the more familiar lists of storm names. These 21-name-lists assign names to storms using each letter of the English alphabet in order save for the letters: Q, U, X, Y, and Z.

There are now 6 lists of names in rotation that are reused every 6 years. This means that the current 2020 list will be used again in 2026. A name is removed only if a storm is so deadly or costly that the future use of its name on a different storm would be inappropriate. For example, the aforementioned Katrina from 2005 and Andrew from 1992 are names that are currently retired.

The 2005 hurricane season ended with Zeta which is only the sixth letter of the Greek Alphabet and not the last letter as one might think. That storm actually formed so late in 2005 that it was able to remain a named storm into early January 2006!
Interestingly, in 2005, we didn’t spill over into the Greek alphabet until October 22nd. This means that we have a one-month jump in 2020. How far down the Greek alphabet will we go this year? We’ll just have to wait and see.

Here are some links that might be of interest to this topic:  the Wikipedia article on the 2020 Atlantic Hurricane Season, the Wikipedia article on the 2005 Atlantic Hurricane Season, the Wikipedia article listing the Greek alphabet, The National Hurricane Center.