Alabama has jumped in and out of Spring it seems with temperatures heating up, cooling off, heating up again, and cooling off again. But as the calendar moves steadily along attention begins to turn to June 1st, the start of the Atlantic hurricane season.
Hurricanes are named using a rotating 6-year list put together through a cooperative effort of the meteorological services in the Atlantic Basin. Experience shows that the use of short, distinctive names in written and 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.
Since 1953, Atlantic tropical storms have been named from lists originated by the National Hurricane Center. They are now maintained and updated by an international committee of the World Meteorological Organization. The original name lists featured only women’s names. But in 1979, men’s names were introduced and they alternate with the women’s names. Six lists are used in rotation. Thus, the 2010 list will be used again in 2016.
In the event that more than 21 named tropical cyclones occur in the Atlantic basin in a season, additional storms will take names from the Greek alphabet: Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, and so on. 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 28th, 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.
The list for 2010 includes Alex, Bonnie, Colin, Danielle, Earl, Fiona, Gaston, Hermine, Igor, Julia, Karl, Lisa, Matthew, Nicole, Otto, Paula, Richard, Shary, Tomas, Virginie, and Walter. Wow, not one single name from the Blog team or from WeatherBrains. Hurricane James would be particularly scary – or Hurricane JB!!!
Early projections are suggesting a reasonably active season with 15 named storms – 10 named storms is about average. This projection come from the work done by Dr. William Gray and his colleagues while the NOAA seasonal forecast is not out yet.
-Brian-
