Here's What Happens If a Tropical Storm or Hurricane With a Greek Alphabet Name Needs to Be Retired

 Chris Dolce 

Published: September 22,2020

The Atlantic hurricane season has easily exhausted its list of names this year and has already crossed off two more from a backup list of Greek alphabet names. That begs the question: what happens if a Greek alphabet name needs to be retired because of the damage it caused?

Atlantic tropical cyclone name lists repeat every six years unless a storm is so severe that the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) hurricane committee votes to retire that name from future lists. This avoids the use of, say, Harvey, Katrina, Maria or Sandy to describe a future weak, open-ocean tropical storm.

Since 1953, when the naming of Atlantic tropical cyclones ditched the phonetic alphabet, 89 Atlantic tropical cyclone names have been retired through 2018.

This year's exceptional pace of named storms has already crossed off Alpha and Beta from the secondary list of Greek alphabet names. 2005 is the only other year when the naming of tropical storms and hurricanes had to dip into this backup list; There were six storms that received Greek alphabet names that year.

Following the 2005 season, the WMO hurricane committee met and decided to keep using the Greek alphabet names as a backup list each year. This was based on the fact that using Greek alphabet names would not be frequent enough to justify a change to this policy.

That WMO meeting also determined that the retirement of a Greek alphabet name for a particularly damaging tropical storm or hurricane was not feasible.

Instead, the committee opted to introduce a policy where if a tropical storm or hurricane with a Greek alphabet name needed to be retired, it would include the name along with the year of occurrence in its list of retired names. That Greek alphabet name would then continue to be available for any other times the backup list is used in the future.

Three of the six Greek alphabet names used in 2005 impacted land areas of the Caribbean and Central America. However, none of them caused enough damage for the newly created Greek alphabet name retirement policy to be used when the WMO committee met the following year.

It's likely we'll cross off additional Greek alphabet names this year, especially since more than two months remain in hurricane season. An average season has produced three more named storms from early October through November, based on National Hurricane Center statistics from 1966 to 2009.

The Weather Company’s primary journalistic mission is to report on breaking weather news, the environment and the importance of science to our lives. This story does not necessarily represent the position of our parent company, IBM.

The Weather Company’s primary journalistic mission is to report on breaking weather news, the environment and the importance of science to our lives. This story does not necessarily represent the position of our parent company, IBM.