SPEAKER 1: Have you ever wondered how hurricanes and typhoons get their names?
Hurricane Katrina, Typhoon Bopha--
did someone just pick these out of a hat?
Not exactly.
There's actually a worldwide organization that decides on lists of names
to be used for tropical cyclones.
Naming hurricanes and typhoons is a relatively new thing.
It really only started in the early 20th century.
And it's mostly thanks to one guy.
Hurricanes used to be named for the places they hit and when they hit.
Like Hurricane Santa Ana, which damaged Puerto Rico in 1825,
or the Great Galveston Hurricane of 1900, a category 4 storm that
devastated that Texas city.
That seems like a reasonable system.
So why did it change?
Using first names for hurricanes seems to have started in the late 1890s in Australia
with this guy, Clement Wragge.
He was a meteorologist who amused himself by naming storms
after women, mythological characters, and politicians he didn't like.
But a method that may have started as one man's joke turned out to have some serious merits.
During World War II, U.S. Navy and Army meteorologists began using
their wives' and girlfriends' names for storms.
It was much simpler for communication purposes to use one name, especially a name
they weren't likely to forget.
Things got official in 1953, when the National Weather
Service put together an alphabetical list of women's names
to use for hurricanes in the Atlantic.
Now, a committee at the World Meteorological Organization, an agency of the United Nations,
decides the names for hurricanes and typhoons.
It used to be that only women's names were used.
But in the late 1970s, everyone agreed that was really kind of sexist.
So they started using men's names too.
But they don't pick just any old name that strikes their fancy as a storm is developing.
There are very specific lists of names that get used.
Meteorologists divide up the earth into tropical cyclone basins,
or regions, where these kinds of storms happen annually about the same time every year.
The Atlantic Basin has six lists of 21 names each.
And the lists cycle yearly.
Each tropical cyclone basin has its own list that's used the same way.
Because the lists are recycled, many of the names of the 2019 lists
will be used again in 2025.
Call it weather deja vu.
But there are some exceptions.
Sometimes, a hurricane or typhoon is so strong and so devastating
to the land it hits that the WMO agrees to retire the name.
It simply wouldn't be right to use the name for another storm.
Thankfully, the technology that helps predict hurricanes and typhoons
keeps getting better and better.
The sooner meteorologists can identify an impending storm, by name or otherwise,
the sooner they can inform the public to help minimize the human impact.
So next time you see someone reporting on a major storm nearing the coast,
you'll know the name they give it isn't off the top of their head.
In fact, it was already determined years before the storm even started.