Why do hurricanes have names?

Storm Shield Meteorologist Jason Meyers answers this question.

The short answer is this - it's a whole lot easier and less confusing to name these big hurricanes.

There is a lot of history leading up to this answer.

Places that saw a lot of hurricane activity, like the West Indies, have been naming storms since the middle of the 19th century. They'd name these storms after a saint's day the hurricane hit nearest.

At the end of the 19th century and on the other side of the world, an Australian meteorologist was naming storms, too. But instead of saints, he mostly used the names of politicians because he couldn't think of anyone else who wandered around aimlessly and blew hot air.

The rest of us were identifying these storms by their latitude and longitude, which, as you can imagine, wasn't very helpful for anyone not aware of their exact location at all times.

Not to mention, it's a lot harder to say twenty-one degrees north, seventy degrees west as compared to Hurricane Earl.

It'd get even more confusing if there were two storms... imagine throwing out all those coordinates and expecting people to follow.

Occasionally, these storms would be named after the fact, usually named after something or some place it destroyed. Not very helpful when you're trying to keep people safe ahead of time.

Eventually, meteorologists started unofficially naming these huge, destructive storms after their wives. Whether that was meant to be a compliment or an insult, I have no idea.

In 1950, we got serious and started naming storms in alphabetical order. It was based on military terms. Think Able, Baker, Charlie, Dog, and so on.

That only lasted three years. It became a little confusing, so in 1953, we started using female names in alphabetical order, similar to what we use today.

By 1979, we started alternating women and men's names - we didn't want to be sexist.

Now, six different lists are used in rotation. Some of those storm names will be retired if they're especially deadly or expensive... think Katrina or Andrew.

If that's the case, The World Meteorological Organization gets together and picks replacement names chosen from the different countries that could be affected by these natural disasters.

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