ON OCTOBER 29th 2012, Hurricane Sandy hit New York. Some 200 people died and the costs were put at $71 billion, a toll that has been surpassed only by the fury of Hurricane Katrina, which struck New Orleans in 2005. But neither Sandy nor Katrina will ever strike again: meteorologists promptly retired both names. The United Nations’ World Meteorological Organisation chooses storm names from lists that are recycled every six years, but discards those that have been attached to storms of dreadful destruction. Controversial ones like Adolf and Isis have also been struck off. So how are hurricanes named—and how did this convention come about?
For several hundred years, Caribbean islanders, who seemed to face the wrath of God with great frequency, named hurricanes after saints. But storm-naming was haphazard. In the 1850s an Atlantic storm that wrecked a boat named Antje became “Antje’s hurricane”, while another that hit Florida on Labor Day took the name, “Labor Day”. At the end of the 19th century, Clement Wragge, an Australian forecaster, tried to impose a system, naming storms after letters of the Greek alphabet. When the Australian government refused to recognise this, he began naming hurricanes after politicians instead. Unsurprisingly, a system that appeared to describe a politician as “causing great distress” or “wandering aimlessly about the Pacific” encountered resistance. Another approach was to describe hurricanes by the latitude and longitude co-ordinates that had enabled meteorologists to track them. But this was unhelpful to those who lived on the coast and relied on succinct life-saving counsel over the radio.
