Hurricanes and Tropical Storms

Since 1953 severe North Atlantic storms have been assigned human names by the National Hurricane Center. According to the NHC, this is done because "the use of short, distinctive names in written as well as spoken communications is quicker and less subject to error than the older, more cumbersome latitude-longitude identification methods."

From 1953 to 1978 storms were given feminine names, in alphabetic order starting with the letter A each new year (the letters Q, U, X, Y and Z are not used). In 1979 an alternating masculine-feminine alphabetic naming scheme was introduced. Also in this year a set of six lists were standardized, to be used in rotation every six years. However, the name of a particularly destructive hurricane could be retired and replaced with a new name.

The list below only includes human names given to North Atlantic storms. This excludes anything except tropical storms (winds between 62 and 117 km/h) and hurricanes (winds above 117 km/h), since lesser storms are not named. Also excluded are storms named for Greek letters, which occurs when the alphabet has been exhausted in a particular year. This happened for the first time in 2005.

It should be noted that storms in other regions are also given names (for example, storms in the North Pacific have Hawaiian names), but these are not included in the list below.